The Golden Egg

by Donna Leon

  ‘No one likes to hear bad things about people they like, do they?’ the barman asked.

  ‘No, not at all,’ Brunetti said, shaking his head and deciding to meet cliché with cliché: ‘But life’s a funny thing: it tells us things we don’t want to hear.’ He shook his head and then, deciding it would be best not to ask more questions, he reached into his pocket and took out some change. He asked how much he owed, left more than that on the counter, thanked the man for his time, and left the bar.

  Foa was on the deck, bent over a copy of La Gazzetta dello Sport, giving the impression that he wanted to eat it, rather than read it. He heard Brunetti’s footsteps and reached a hand across the open space to help him on to the boat.

  ‘Latest scandal?’ Brunetti asked, pointing to the screaming headlines.

  Foa folded the paper closed and stuffed it under

  the control panel. ‘It’s strange, Commissario,’ he said as he moved past Brunetti to unmoor the boat. ‘We all know it’s fake, that the games are all fixed, but you’d think they’d be more clever about keeping what they’re doing secret.’ He reached down and slapped the paper with the back of his fingers. ‘They’re blabbing about it on the phone all the time, sending emails back and forth, talking about how much they want to be paid to lose the game, giving the names of the players who will help.’ He turned the key, revved the engine, and pulled away from the riva, heading for the Grand Canal.

  They turned right, back towards the Questura. Foa seemed to have exhausted his comments on soccer and sportsmanship, but Brunetti wondered if he might still be interested in blabbing.

  ‘That palazzo belongs to a family called Lembo,’ he began. ‘You ever hear of them?’

  A taxi was making straight for them, the driver busy on his telefonino. Keeping one hand on the tiller, Foa gave a sharp blast of their siren. The driver looked up and saw them, dropped his telefonino and pulled his boat skittering to the right. ‘Stupid bastard,’ Foa said as the two boats passed.

  Then, taxi forgotten, he said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Much?’

  ‘Enough. Give me a day, sir, and I’ll know a lot more.’ He turned and smiled at Brunetti, unable to disguise his pleasure at being treated like a real policeman.

  Brunetti was content to stand and watch the buildings and the light, entranced, as he so often was, by the casual, unending beauty of it. Stone, sky, gold, marble, space, proportion, chaos, disorder, glory.

  They glided to the dock. Foa switched off the engine and tossed the mooring rope effortlessly over the stanchion, jumped to the dock and held out a hand to Brunetti. It was the second time that day the younger man had offered him a hand: Brunetti put his lightly on the outstretched arm and jumped to the riva.

  He decided it was time to throw Signorina Elettra some fresh meat and went to her office. She was not at her desk, but the door to Patta’s office was open and he could hear voices, one of them hers, from inside. He could have stood by the door to hear what they were saying, but the idea displeased him: next, he’d be scrolling through her computer files, using the skills she had taught him.

  Instead he went to the window and looked down at the waters of the canal; he thought about the man in the bar and what he had told him. ‘Daughters.’ After some time, he heard footsteps and then the closing of the door to Patta’s office. Signorina Elettra came across the room and gave him a smile. She sat behind her computer and said, without asking him what he had found in Dorsoduro, ‘I am a saint.’

  ‘You are a saint,’ Brunetti repeated. ‘You are probably also a martyr.’

  ‘I am a martyr.’

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘This office,’ she surprised him by saying.

  ‘What?’ he asked and then, as the obvious dawned, he changed that to the even more obvious, ‘For whom?’

  ‘Lieutenant Scarpa,’ she said, as if this could be the only answer. As it certainly was.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘So their symbiosis can grow even stronger, I imagine,’ she said angrily. Brunetti wondered when he had ever seen her really angry, to the extent that her face was red and her voice tight, as was the case now.

  ‘Can’t you stop it?’ Brunetti asked, realizing how tentative his voice sounded.

  ‘Of course I can,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, unable to hide his astonishment.

  ‘Because I don’t want to have to leave.’

  His heart stopped. Brunetti was not given to excessive reactions, nor to excessive language, but he felt his heart stop, well, at least miss a few beats and then begin again with a faster rhythm.

  ‘But you can’t even think about that,’ he bleated before he could adjust the tone. ‘I mean, if you’re going to leave, then you should have a better reason for it than that.’

  He thought about offering her his office but knew Patta would never accept that. He felt as though he had walked into a wall.

  ‘I don’t mean leave leave, I mean leave this floor.’

  ‘For where?’ Brunetti asked, disguising his relief and running his mind through the building.

  ‘All I have to do is change a few offices around,’ she said, her anger subsiding.

  There was something in the ease with which she

  said this, as if the task were no more complicated than prising the cork from a bottle of prosecco, that jangled Brunetti’s nerves. He sent his memory through the building again, seeking out the offices that might be suitable to her and the names of the persons who currently used those offices. And there it was, on the same floor as his but on the other side of the building, a much smaller room with a view of the garden in the back. The room was currently crowded with two enormous cupboards no one had thought to move when the desk was put in and the office was given to Claudia Griffoni.

  He stopped himself from slapping his palm to his forehead and crying out ‘Aha!’ but that did not dull the clarity of his revelation. Signorina Elettra felt little simpatia for her: it was as simple as that. Brunetti had no idea of the reason: he did not want to attribute it to feminine jealousy and, to avoid discussion of that, he had chosen never to talk to Paola about it.

  His wiser self told him to stay out of this, to make no comment, and to pretend it did not concern or interest him, so long as she found an office. ‘Well,’ he said idly, ‘I hope you can work it out.’ He tried to think of a quid pro quo he could offer Patta. The consequences of non-intervention here, he knew, would not be peace in our time.

  Careful to make it clear that what he was about to offer was much more interesting than any talk of offices and who would move into them, he said, ‘I have a name for you.’

  ‘For?’

  ‘For you to have a look at.’ Seeing that this had caught her attention, he said, ‘I went over to Dorsoduro to have a look at the palazzo.’ In an attempt to relax things further, he added, ‘And I came back with a name.’

  ‘Which is?’ she said, turning the computer screen to

  face her.

  ‘Lucrezia Lembo.’

  ‘The wife of the Copper King?’

  ‘The daughter. There are at least two, and they apparently still live at that address.’

  Signorina Elettra smiled a real smile, relaxed and easy, and he watched tension and anger seep away from her. ‘I’ll see what I can find,’ she said.

  ‘The person who gave me her name said she’s had a troubled life: men, trouble with her kids, divorce, alcohol.’

  She pulled her lips together. ‘That’s more than enough for anyone.’

  ‘I’d like anything you can find about either of the sisters: I don’t know the name of the other one,’ he said. He had a vague memory that both of the parents had died.

  She hit a few keys, then a few more; she read for a moment, hit some more keys, and when Brunetti saw her begin to smile again he wondered if it was at the thought of being back at work or at the prospect of being able to access the data banks of the various institutions of
the city without having to bother about pesky things like warrants or permissions or orders from magistrates.

  He thanked her and started back to his office, proud of having returned an angry, petulant woman to her rightful place as a buccaneer utterly without respect for rules or regulations.

  15

  At the bottom of the flight of steps that would take him to his office, Brunetti glanced at his watch and saw that it was after two. It was likely to be one of the last temperate days of the year, and he felt himself entitled, after what he chose to think of as his morning’s work, to lunch with his wife. Paola had told him that the kids would not be there, so he could be as late as he pleased, and he decided to take her at her word.

  As he made his way towards Rialto, he played at something he told himself resembled that three-dimensional oriental chess game he had read about but not understood and that might be called Go. He had no idea of the rules and so invented his own: he assumed that the people he shifted to another office on another floor would go without complaint and without rancour, emulating the man in the Bible who picked up his bed and walked away.

  Scarpa to Signorina Elettra’s, Signorina Elettra to Claudia Griffoni’s. The large cabinets to the archive, where their high shelves would save some papers from the effects of mildew and time. And where was Griffoni supposed to go? Into the converted cupboard which had been Lieutenant Scarpa’s office for years?

  He said nothing about the problem of Signorina Elettra’s office during the meal, finding the calamaretti con piselli more interesting than the territorial disputes of his colleagues. He waited until he was standing beside Paola, drying the dishes and putting them back in the cabinet, but drying them very slowly and not paying attention to what he was doing. He continued to dry a wine glass until she reached out with a wet hand, took the glass from him and set it on the counter. ‘What’s bothering you?’ she asked.

  ‘Women.’

  It was seldom that Brunetti managed to stop Paola in her tracks, so her expression gave him a certain satisfaction. ‘In general? Or specifically?’ she asked. She rinsed her hands and took the towel from him to dry them.

  ‘Specifically,’ Brunetti answered.

  Appearing to ignore him, she said, ‘How nice it would be to live on the first floor.’

  ‘With damp and no light?’ Brunetti asked, thinking of the ground-floor offices in the Questura; he had not even dared to consider moving any of the players in his game to them.

  ‘With only one flight of steps if we want to go out to get a coffee in a bar,’ she corrected. She reached up for the caffetiera, added water, put in the coffee, screwed the top on tightly, and set it on the stove. Paola was certain to return to the subject of women, so he went back into the living room and stood at the window. The clouds had grown heavier during lunch, and a light rain was falling.

  She came in with two cups, sugar already added. She handed him one, stood stirring hers, and asked, ‘Which ones, specifically?’

  ‘Signorina Elettra and Claudia Griffoni,’ he answered.

  ‘They’ve come to blows?’ she asked.

  He sipped at his coffee, finished it, and set the cup on a table. ‘You always talk about feminine jealousy.’

  ‘When I’m not speaking about male jealousy,’ she reminded him. She went and sat on the edge of the sofa, waiting.

  ‘It’s about an office,’ he began. ‘But that’s just a pretext. Elettra has never taken to her. It’s evident every time I mention her.’

  ‘And Griffoni’s feelings?’

  Brunetti had never considered this. ‘I’m not sure that she’s noticed.’

  She waved a hand in the air. ‘Earth to Guido, Planet Earth to Guido. Are you there?’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘It means that if Elettra doesn’t like someone, there is no way that the person would not notice it.’

  He thought of Signorina Elettra’s perpetual, and public, goading of Lieutenant Scarpa, so different from the gentle, almost affectionate, pokes she took at Vice-Questore Patta. One man disgusted her, the other caused only irritation. With Griffoni, however, she had been assiduously polite, as she was with no one else at the Questura.

  When he explained this to Paola, she said, ‘How does Griffoni behave?’

  ‘The same way. It’s as if she’s addressing a head of state.’

  ‘Well, she is, isn’t she?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Signorina Elettra, at least from what you’ve told me, runs the place. Or she certainly runs Patta, which comes to the same thing.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘So Griffoni’s formality could be nothing more than deference to her position.’ Before Brunetti could object, she said, ‘Remember, she’s a Sicilian, and they’re far more hierarchical in their thinking than we are. If they come of good families, the impulse towards politeness is even stronger.’

  ‘It’s been three years.’

  ‘They’ll work things out. It sounds to me as if each is simply waiting for the other one to show some sign of informality.’

  Brunetti, refusing to believe this, asked, ‘What do I do? Stay out of it and break it up when they’re rolling around on the floor with their hands on each other’s throat?’

  ‘You said something about an office,’ Paola reminded him. ‘Is it about who gets one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who makes that decision?’

  ‘Patta.’

  ‘Is there some way you can blackmail him into averting hostilities?’

  Of course, after decades at the university, she would think of the most underhand way to deal with a problem. He had so far forgotten to tell Patta that there was no risk to the mayor’s son because of the bribes being paid to the Polizia Municipale. Patta, however, need not be told how easy it had been to discover that. Let him think that Brunetti had had to call in favours from the forces of order, ask old friends to turn a blind eye, risk his own reputation in defence of the mayor’s son and his re-election campaign, his political future.

  If he made his efforts sound sufficiently Herculean, he might also add a request that Foa be temporarily assigned to the Guardia Costiera.

  He bent down and kissed her. ‘I tremble to think of what you’ve been learning all these years from those novels you read,’ he said and went back to the Questura.

  The rain grew heavier while he was still on the way as a serious shower turned into the first full pounding-down of the autumn. Glad that he had worn his light raincoat, Brunetti did not try to stop and wait it out; although he quickened his pace for the last ten minutes, he still arrived at the Questura with his head and shoulders soaked.

  He rubbed his hair with both hands, wiped them on his handkerchief, then used it to swipe at his hair. Upstairs, he hung his coat on the door of the cupboard and decided to go down to speak to Signorina Elettra.

  Once again, when he entered she was not at her desk. The door to Patta’s office was again ajar, and he could hear his superior’s voice from behind it, though he

  could not make out what he was saying. He went and stood by the window, removing himself from temptation, but when he looked down at the riva he saw Signorina Elettra stepping into a police launch, Foa holding her hand to steady her on the slippery deck.

  Brunetti moved closer to the door.

  ‘I realize the seriousness of the situation, Signore,’ Patta said in a placatory voice. ‘I’ve got one of my best men looking into it, you can be sure.’ There followed a long pause. ‘Yes, he’s Venetian, sir.’

  Brunetti, one of Patta’s best men, moved silently across the office and went back upstairs to his own.

  His phone started to ring when he was still a few metres from the room. Quickening his steps, he picked it up on the seventh ring. ‘Brunetti,’ he said.

  ‘Guido, it’s Ettore,’ he heard Rizzardi say.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A strange thing’s happened, and I thought I should

  tell you.’

&n
bsp; ‘What?’

  ‘You sent one of your men over here with the mother of that man who died, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. What happened?’

  ‘Oh, she identified him. The young man couldn’t have been kinder to her.’

  ‘Is that why you’re calling?’

  ‘No, she’s back: that’s why.’

  ‘Back where?’

  ‘Back in the hospital.’

  ‘With you?’

  ‘No. In the Emergency Room.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Favaro,’ he said, naming one of his assistants. ‘He

  saw her when she came to identify her son, and

  he recognized her when she was brought in by the ambulance, so he came to tell me.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen her.’

  ‘Did he say anything about her?’

  ‘Yes. He said it looked like someone beat her up.’

  16

  He called the officers’ squad room, only to be told that Pucetti was out on patrol. He asked for the young man’s telefonino number, entered it into his own, and called. Pucetti answered, said he was in San Marco, watching the pigeons and the tourists avoid the rain.

  Brunetti told him about Rizzardi’s call and was surprised by the force of the young man’s response. ‘What happened? Is she badly hurt?’

  Brunetti repeated that all he knew was what Rizzardi had told him: she was in the Emergency Room, and it looked as if she’d been attacked.

  ‘Can I meet you there, Commissario?’ Pucetti asked.

  ‘That’s why I’m calling,’ Brunetti said, surprised that Pucetti hadn’t assumed that. ‘I’m leaving now. Rizzardi will meet us there.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Fifteen minutes.’ The young man broke the connection before he did.

  He looked out the window: no sign of Foa or his boat. He put on his raincoat, took his umbrella from the bottom of the cupboard, and left the Questura, telling the man

  at the door that he was going to the hospital to talk to a witness.