by Donna Leon
‘Do you want to hear what else my aunt said?’ Foa asked, failing to disguise how much he was offended by their having cut off his story.
Brunetti put a hand on his arm and said, ‘Of course. I’m sorry. What else did she say?’
‘That she was a beautiful girl, and all the boys in the neighbourhood were crazy for her. But she never had anything to do with them, like she thought she was too good for them or something.’ He reflected on this, then asked, as though the question had no suitable answer, ‘She’s a girl from San Polo, and she’s too good for the local boys?’
‘My daughter’s a girl from San Polo,’ Brunetti said lightly, ‘and I certainly think she’s better than most of the boys I’ve seen in the neighbourhood.’
It took a moment, but when Foa understood, he laughed and increased the speed to get them to the Lembo palazzo.
22
Foa pulled up at the place where he had taken Brunetti the last time but showed no desire to linger, perhaps still smarting from their apparent lack of interest in his aunt’s story. He helped them up from the boat, waved, and proceeded on towards the Canale of the Giudecca.
The wind had dropped, but it had grown colder, and Brunetti wished he had brought a scarf with him or had thought to wear a heavier jacket. Griffoni, he noticed, wore a padded coat that came to just above her knees and seemed not to notice the cold at all.
As they walked up the calle, she asked, ‘How do we play this?’
‘We see what happens and we react to that,’ was the only thing he could think of suggesting.
There was no response. A boat was passing in the canal at the end of the calle, and he waited to ring the bell again until it passed out of hearing. He pushed and kept his finger on the bell; both of them heard the far-off echo from inside.
If no one comes, he told himself, then that’s it, and I’ll forget all about it. Let the dead rest. Let them all rest. He allowed a full minute to pass and then rang the bell again, holding his finger there for a long time.
Inside, a door slammed, and Brunetti flushed with relief. Someone was there, and he could go on with this.
Suddenly the door was pulled open. No warning, no sound from inside: it was closed, and then it was open. A tall woman who might have been the older sister of the woman who had been wearing the bikini in the photos Signorina Elettra had shown him stood before them. She wore a grey tracksuit that appeared to have been bought for a thinner person.
Time had passed since the photos had been taken, but more time had passed for her, or harder time. One glance told Brunetti that her face had been lifted, perhaps a number of times, but at some point she had abandoned the attempt or the trouble and had accepted the inevitable. Wrinkles had accumulated under her chin like thick batter poured too slowly from a bowl. Her hair was a rusty red, pulled back in a ponytail, frayed hairs curling away from her head.
Little rivulets, looking like something between a U and a V, hung below her eyes, the flesh above them darker than the skin of her face. She stared, first at the man
and then the woman, with eyes devoid of curiosity or interest. ‘Sì?’ she asked. Had they been coming to collect the rent or to tell her the house was on fire, her response to their presence would have been the same.
‘Signora Lembo?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Sì,’ she answered neutrally.
‘I’m Commissario Brunetti, and this is Commissario Griffoni. We’d like to speak to you.’
‘About what?’
‘Ana Cavanella.’
Her eyes changed, came alive, though not in a manner Brunetti found particularly appealing. She looked at Griffoni, and when Brunetti glanced aside at her he saw that his colleague had assumed a slumped posture that took centimetres off her height. Her posture had also managed to become graceless and awkward, her face so reduced in expression or signs of interest as to be almost plain; certainly not attractive.
‘What do you want to know about her?’ Lucrezia Lembo – for this must be Lucrezia – asked. She moved her hand from behind her and took a deep pull on her cigarette, almost as if she had thought, until then, that she had to hide it. Tilting her head back, she blew a long line of perfect smoke rings into the air. Brunetti could not repress a smile of appreciation, which she saw.
‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘It’s cold out here.’
She turned and went across the small courtyard to a door, opened it, and climbed stiffly up a single steep flight of steps. They followed, Brunetti averting his eyes from the sight of her broad buttocks ahead of him on the steps. The hallway they entered was even colder than the courtyard had been. The only sound was their footsteps, his and Griffoni’s: when he did look, he saw that the woman wore bedroom slippers. No wonder they had not heard her cross the courtyard.
At the end of the corridor she opened a door that led to another corridor. She left it to them to follow her and close it, which Brunetti did. He thought of how many times he had watched this scene in films, both good and bad: the innocent welcomed into the home of the killer; the killers coming into the home of the innocent.
The woman paused in front of another door long enough to poke her cigarette into a brimming ashtray that stood on a walnut table. This door led to a dimly lit room that must once have been a library. Most of the shelves were empty, and what books remained lay like rectangular drunks, any which way, on the shelves. There was even a rolling wooden ladder attached to the shelves, leading up to the highest, they too almost completely devoid of books.
There was no smell of cigarettes in the room. No dust lingered on the books; the carpet was so freshly vacuumed that their shoes left prints on the pile. What little light remained in the day came effortlessly through the windows, which showed no trace of dirt or grime.
Lucrezia lowered herself into the middle of a plush sofa, her feet flat on the floor in front of her. She motioned them to the chairs which sat opposite. ‘What about her?’ she asked.
‘She worked for your family, didn’t she?’ Brunetti asked. Griffoni had, to all intents and purposes, become a deaf mute.
‘Yes. Many years ago.’
It was only then, hearing the way her voice pounded the words, that Brunetti realized she was drunk or drugged, at least enough for her speech to be affected. She moved her ponderous glance to Griffoni but seemed to find her as inert as Brunetti had. Was this all that was left of drugs, sex, and rock and roll? Surely no one could have imagined this.
‘What services did she perform for your family?’
A sudden flash of anger lit Lucrezia’s eyes and her hands drew themselves involuntarily into fists. But, within a second, her face was calm and her hands relaxed. ‘She was a maid, if that’s what you mean,’ she said stolidly.
‘For your mother?’ Brunetti asked, remembering a time when wealthy women had what were called ‘ladies’ maids’.
Again, that lightning flash, the involuntary motion of her hands followed by the instant calm. ‘No. She was the maid for the entire family.’
‘She was very young, wasn’t she?’
‘She was fifteen when she came here,’ she said. Her displeasure hit harder on the words this time, again giving voice to whatever she had drunk or used. ‘It depends on how young you consider that.’ Brunetti thought the age uninteresting; it was her response to it that struck him: why would she remember something like that from half a century ago?
‘It’s a dangerous age,’ Griffoni stunned him by saying, not so much for the words as by the fact that he had all but forgotten about her, sitting there, humble, plain, silent. Waiting.
Lucrezia’s eyes swivelled in the direction of the woman next to Brunetti and she studied this suddenly vocal thing. Griffoni was looking at the hands clasped in her lap, but enough of her face was visible for the other woman to see the suddenly furrowed brow and tightened mouth.
‘Dangerous,’ Lucrezia repeated with no expression at all. It might as easily have been a shoe size she was giving. With no explanation, she got to her
feet, crossed the room, and went out, leaving the door open behind her.
Brunetti turned to his colleague with an inquisitive glance, but she, perhaps thinking of Lucrezia’s silent feet, held a finger to her lips and shook her head. He looked around the room again, made uncomfortable by the contrast between the spotless cleanliness and the disorderly state of the books.
Griffoni apparently incommunicado, he turned his thoughts to Davide Cavanella. He had no determinable age: he could have been born when Ana Cavanella worked here, or after. The family had watched her grow up, ripen, mature. He recalled, as if he had photographed them, Lucrezia’s tight hands, replayed the scene of her slowly relaxing them, forcing them, perhaps, to open and look natural. He recalled the look in her eyes when he asked what Ana’s services – such an inopportune choice of word – to the family had been. Who could know if she had been a ladies’ maid or a maid of all work, or what she had been? Or what her services were? And for whom?
Lucrezia Lembo came back into the room. Both Brunetti and Griffoni could see the difference: she was calmer, her body relaxed and her walk more fluid. Her hair, Brunetti thought, was the same, as was her body, but she looked refreshed, even younger; certainly happier.
She returned to her place on the sofa and lowered herself into it with another sigh. ‘We were saying?’ she asked, trying to smile in Brunetti’s direction but unable to keep her attention from returning to the silent Griffoni.
‘I was asking you about Ana Cavanella, who once worked for your family,’ Brunetti reminded her.
‘Yes, I think I remember her,’ Lucrezia said in a voice that had grown almost languid. ‘Pretty girl, wasn’t she?’
‘I didn’t know her then,’ Brunetti said, not thinking it expedient to tell her that he had been a child at the time. Then, deciding to lie, he added, ‘But my father might have.’
Her eyes turned to him, and only then came into focus. ‘How is that?’ she asked.
‘He ran a boat service, a kind of taxi, but he also transported precious objects for antique dealers.’ Brunetti put on his easiest smile, one filled with the remembrance of past times, happier times, in his father’s case, times that had never existed. ‘He had a delicate touch. That’s what the dealers said. So they trusted him to move things.’ Again, that smile. ‘I remember him speaking of your father.’ Given his age at the time, this was highly unlikely, but he doubted she would consider this.
Lucrezia’s mouth put on a smile. ‘My father bought a lot of things,’ she said, listened to the echo of her own words, and smiled again, but this smile, though real, was not pretty. She waved her hands at the almost empty shelves, and Brunetti looked at them admiringly. ‘So your father might have worked for him,’ she concluded, speaking as though the words were somehow meaningful and related to their previous conversation.
Brunetti repeated the smile that greets good times recalled. ‘He said your father was always very generous to him, and to the men who worked with him,’ Brunetti invented. Generosity was so appealing that everyone wanted it to be attributed to them, unlike a sense of justice or probity: those unwieldy, uncomfortable virtues.
‘Oh, he was very generous, my father,’ she said so slyly that Brunetti was left feeling they were not having the same conversation or not talking about the same thing.
‘That’s dangerous, too,’ Griffoni said with sibylline indifference. ‘Generosity.’ She followed this with a half-mocking snort.
Lucrezia started, as though she had no idea where that voice could be coming from. She turned the vague attention of her eyes towards Griffoni, but she had gone still again. Lucrezia’s confusion splashed across her face. Then, surprising them both, she said, ‘It was my mother who wasn’t generous.’ Her eyes moved to the shelves of the bookcase and then, as if the echo of her words had spent time there before coming back to her, suddenly slapped her hand across her mouth. ‘No. That’s not right. She was good. She made us say the rosary. Every night, before we went to bed, we had to kneel down with her and say the rosary: Monday the Joyful Mysteries, Tuesday the Sorrowful Mysteries, Wednesday the Glorious Mysteries.’ She closed her eyes and brought her hands together, as though holding the beads.
‘The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple,’ she said in an entirely different voice, solemn, deep, reverent. ‘Fruit of the Mystery: Purity. Obedience.’ Brunetti watched her hands move as the invisible beads slowly passed through her fingers. Her lips moved. It looked to Brunetti as if she were repeating the last two words.
In the same type of voice, falling into the same rhythmic incantation, Griffoni said, ‘Better to think of the Crucifixion, Signora. Fruit of the Mystery: Salvation, Forgiveness.’ The hair rose on the back of Brunetti’s neck, and he thought of her duplication of Signorina Elettra’s voice.
Lucrezia’s eyes opened slowly and she looked across at Griffoni, with a softer smile. ‘My mother taught us obedience.’ Her smile dimmed, and she said, ‘She taught it to my father, too.’
She turned her attention to Brunetti and, in an entirely normal voice, said, ‘People called him the King of Copper, I know. But it was my mother who ruled, not him.’
Brunetti was overwhelmed by fear of suffocation, trapped in a world of distorted femininity: Griffoni appeared to have taken leave of her senses and fallen into a religious trance, while the Lembo woman summoned up the spirits of her dead parents, and both of them recited the names of the decades of the rosary he had not
heard since he was a boy, staying with his grandparents and listening to the old women as they fell to their devotions.
He got to his feet and went to the nearest window and pulled it open. Cold air swept into the room. Lucrezia
did not notice, but Griffoni gave him a sharp look and jerked her head to the side, commanding him to close the window. He did so but remained beside it. From there, he could see both of them, but he turned away and looked to the north, where he saw the bell tower of Santo Stefano looking even more crooked than from the ground. ‘Everything tilts but nothing falls,’ he had heard his fellow Venetians say all his life.
Behind him their voices murmured: Brunetti had no idea whether it was the rosary they were saying or whether one of them was confessing to the other. He had not seen, nor had he heard, anything pass between the two women, but he had felt the moment when the rosary had united them in spirit. The memory of that look from Griffoni, however, sent him cringing away from the fraudulence of whatever union had been struck between them while leaving him eager for any advantage it would provide.
The light had diminished across the city while they had been inside. The tower of Santo Stefano was outlined against darkness only by the lights that glowed up from around it. Luminous and heaven-reaching, the tower was out of true and looked as though it would soon collapse: of how many of us could the same thing be said? Brunetti wondered.
Their voices drifted across him like smoke; Brunetti was unable to turn to look at the women and unwilling to know what they were saying: let them swap the names of the decades back and forth, tell each other what virtues they encouraged, but keep him free of it.
Though he tried to block or filter the words, they continued to float past him: ‘Contempt of the World’, ‘Grace of a Happy Death’, ‘Desire for Holiness’, ‘Mortification’, ‘Purity’. Hadn’t they had that one already? Why this obsession with sexual purity? he asked himself. What a distorting way to look at life.
The voices droned on. Finally, unable to endure it, Brunetti turned and looked at them. Lucrezia Lembo’s head was pressed against the back of her chair, her face covered with her hands. Griffoni was leaning forward, speaking to her in a voice so low Brunetti could not hear it.
Something in him snapped at this grotesque religious theatre. ‘Griffoni,’ he said, so loudly that both women turned to him in alarm. ‘That’s enough.’
She knew better than to dispute this with him. She got to her feet, leaned down over Lucrezia, who uncovered her eyes and whispered to her. Griffoni nodded and rea
ched out to touch her arm with her right hand.
Brunetti ignored them both and started for the door. He held it open for Griffoni, who gave the back of the other woman’s hand a few pats and came obediently to Brunetti’s side. Together they left; silently they walked down
the stairs and across the courtyard. Brunetti found the handle and opened the door. Together they stepped out into the narrow calle.
He resisted the urge to slam the door and turned to the left, toward the Accademia stop. Hearing a muffled noise behind him he turned to see Griffoni standing with her arm pressed against the front of the house on the other side of the calle. The night’s chill hit him as Griffoni took a step towards him, grabbed his arm, and fell against him. Without thinking, he wrapped his arm around her and tried to hold her upright. But she started to sink away from him, and he stepped up in front of her to wrap his other arm around her. Her head banged against his shoulder, and one arm slapped against his side.
There was a low barred window nearby, and he half carried, half pushed her towards it. He lowered her until she was sitting on the sill, leaning forward, her
head against his stomach. He crouched down, one hand bracing her against the bars, the other feeling for her pulse, though he had little idea of what he was supposed to
feel there.
Her head fell back and rested against the bars. Her eyes opened, and Brunetti watched her confusion as she saw the wall of the building on the other side of the calle. Suddenly she was aware of him and pulled away, backing against the bars. Then she recognized him, and her face relaxed.
‘What happened?’ she asked and raised a hand to wipe her eyes.
Brunetti relaxed minimally. ‘I think you fainted.’
‘I never faint,’ she said, managing to sound offended.
‘Perhaps it was a vision of the Madonna,’ Brunetti risked saying.
Her eyes widened, but then she smiled. ‘It was too much for me, I think,’ she said.
‘What was?’
