by Donna Leon
He recognized the portly form that moved away, feet splayed to either side, forced there by thick thighs. From his right hand hung the battered brown leather briefcase that had, over the years, become a metaphor for the man: Beni Borsetta, aka Beniamino Cresti, lawyer to the masses, paladin of the lower orders in their endless fight against the myriad injustices of the wealthy and successful. For a mere 50 per cent, it was rumoured in some circles.
As Brunetti watched, Cresti turned right at the end of the corridor, showing in profile the out-thrust paunch that Brunetti had several times seen clear a path from the courtrooms in which Avvocato Cresti had worked in the pursuit of justice.
He glanced at his watch, propped his shoulders against the wall of the corridor, and began to draw up a list of reasons why Beni Borsetta might have taken his briefcase on a visit to the hospital. He could come up with none he liked, but he found all of them interesting. He let a few minutes pass before he went down to the door from which the lawyer had emerged. Standing slightly to the side, he knocked and said, in a normal voice, ‘Signora Cavanella?’
He heard a voice answer and went in. She was sitting up in bed today, looking much better, though her face was worse. That is, though she recognized him and seemed fully conscious, the entire left side, from the eye to her hairline and down across her cheekbone and almost to her chin, had turned a light grey-red that Brunetti knew would, in two days, turn almost black.
‘Good morning, Signora,’ he said.
‘You’re the policeman, aren’t you?’ she asked. Her look was calm, lucid, disconcertingly so, at least to someone who was now curious to see how the viper might manifest itself.
He approached the bed, his face taut with a look of concern. He allowed himself a small smile, rich in every sign of relief. ‘I’m glad you recognize me, Signora.’
‘I recognized you the other time,’ she said, annoyed but not angry.
He broadened his smile. ‘I’m even happier to learn that, Signora. The doctor was worried about your fall and thought you might have a concussion.’ There it was: from the police. A fall.
She did not smile, but her face softened, as if she too felt relief. ‘I hit my head.’ Then, meaning it as a joke, ‘I suppose it was as hard as whatever it hit.’
Brunetti added a nod to his smile, radiating satisfaction at this happy circumstance. ‘Have they told you when you can go home?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Good,’ Brunetti said and turned, as if preparing to leave the room. What were she and Beni up to? he wondered. She had said nothing about having tripped, so perhaps she was not going to claim negligence on the part of the city, one of Beni’s standard cases. And since it was being treated as a fall, Beni was not going to bring a case of assault, as he had over many barroom shoves – even once against the owner of a bicycle over which a man had tripped.
His phone rang and, excusing himself to the woman, he answered it.
‘Lucrezia Lembo owns the house,’ Griffoni said.
‘I see.’
‘But Ana Cavanella’s son had the legal right to stay in it all of his life, after which it reverts to the owner or her heirs.’
‘I see,’ he repeated. ‘And when did this start?’
‘If you mean the contract, it was the the year she left her job at the Lembos’.’
‘Ah,’ was all Brunetti would permit himself to say. But then he thought of something else and asked, ‘And the expenses?’
‘Paid by Lucrezia Lembo: tax, gas, light, garbage.’ Then, before he could ask, ‘We’re checking Cavanella’s bank account.’
‘We?’
‘Signorina Elettra and I. She’s much better at these things than I am.’ True as that might be, Brunetti, who had recognized Signorina Elettra’s office telephone as the source of the call, had to admit that Griffoni was no slouch when it came to flattery.
‘Good. Let me know.’
‘Of course,’ Griffoni said and was gone.
‘Excuse me, Signora,’ he said. ‘My wife.’
‘Of course,’ she said in a warmer voice, as if he had become more human by having a wife.
‘If you need any help, Signora, in getting home, I’m sure we could send a launch, and I’m sure Pucetti would be glad to accompany you.’
‘He’s very kind, Roberto,’ she said.
‘He’s a good boy,’ Brunetti answered, meaning it. He was running out of things to say to keep him there long enough for Griffoni to call him again. It came to him. ‘I’m afraid there’s been no progress, Signora,’ he said.
‘In what?’ She sounded honestly confused.
‘In finding any identification for your son. Official,
that is.’
Her face hardened. ‘I told you. There was a robbery in my house, and they took all of the papers.’
His gaze was so level, his scepticism so palpable, that she said, ‘They took them. And my money. And my wedding ring. Everything.’ For a moment, it looked as though she were going to attempt to cry, but then she abandoned the idea and settled for putting a hand across her eyes.
His phone rang again. ‘Money’s been transferred into her account every month for the last forty years,’ Griffoni said. ‘From Lucrezia Lembo’s account.’
‘Really? And how much would that be?’
‘It started in lire and changed to Euros, but it’s always been the equivalent of a monthly salary.’
‘For what sort of work?’
‘Hardly for a maid. It’s now three thousand Euros.’
‘I see. Thanks. We can talk about it tomorrow,’ he said and replaced his phone in his pocket.
Brunetti waited until Ana Cavanella took her hand from her eyes and looked across at him, when, just as though he were asking her the time, he said, ‘What were you blackmailing the Lembo family about, Signora?’
26
Her mouth opened and stayed that way for a long time. Brunetti saw no expression on her face, only her once-beautiful eyes, frozen now, and the grey-red flush on the left side. This woman, he had been told, had once been thought to be a good girl: her patent fear suggested that Signora Ghezzi’s assessment might be closer to the truth.
‘What are you talking about?’
How many times had he been asked that? Short of a confession, it was as close to an admission of guilt as he had known many people to come. He had heard it said with indignation, incredulity, arrogance, menace; only rarely had he heard it asked in honest confusion: this was not one of those times.
‘Money has been transferred into your bank account for the last forty years, Signora. From Lucrezia Lembo.’
‘I work for her,’ she spat out, trying for indignation.
‘Doing what?’
‘That’s none of your business.’
Brunetti allowed himself a small smile. ‘Perhaps not, Signora.’ Then, after a slight pause, ‘Have you paid taxes on that money?’
He watched the once-beautiful eyes move from him to the window, to the door, as if she were looking for a way out of the room. Failing to find it, she said, ‘She pays the tax.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said. Then, ever so casually, in the voice of the man who had once seemed genuinely concerned for her welfare, he asked, ‘Where are you going to live, Signora?’
This time, her confusion was real. ‘What?’
‘Where will you live now?’
‘What are you talking about?’ she asked so timidly that Brunetti had no doubt about her failure to understand.
‘It was Davide who had the usufrutto for the house.’ He saw she didn’t recognize the legal term. ‘He had the right to stay in it. Not you, Signora. You’ll have to leave.’
A friend of Paola’s often said her son had married a woman with ‘cash-register eyes’, but he had never understood the expression until he watched the calculation Ana Cavanella made in response to his statement.
She stared at the window behind him and to his left, and he had the sense that he had disappeared from the room, so
far as she was concerned. She pulled her eyebrows together, pursed her lips, and worked at the problem for a long time. He saw the moment when she found her way free of it: her brows relaxed, and she gave a small, satisfied nod.
‘That won’t matter,’ she said, and he heard the steel in her voice and at the same time saw her face snap shut.
‘I’m sorry about your son,’ he said and left the room.
He walked from the hospital and went directly to Rosa Salva. He had seen the grey-haired woman behind the bar for at least twenty years, if not more. To Brunetti, she looked much the same as she always had, though that was impossible. He wondered if he looked the same to her, but could not ask, not after all these years of polite formality.
He did ask for a glass of white wine and two panini with ham, then added a tramezzino with ham and artichokes. He avoided looking at himself in the mirror, as he always did in bars.
Ana Cavanella had said it wouldn’t matter that she could no longer stay in the house where she and Davide had been living, and she had used the future tense, the grammar of gamblers, or dreamers. But she’d found her answer. Did this mean the blackmail would continue or that Ana Cavanella saw herself as headed for finer things?
He paid and started towards the Questura.
He found Griffoni in Signorina Elettra’s office, the two of them sitting behind the computer like friends at a PlayStation. When he came in, Griffoni was saying, ‘Could you go back to her will, please?’
She used the familiar tu, and Signorina Elettra answered in kind, when she said, ‘But you’ve already seen it.’
‘I know, but I want . . .’ Griffoni began but stopped when she became aware of Brunetti standing at the door, all traces of paternal approbation wiped from his face. ‘Come and look at this,’ she said, moving her chair to clear a space between them.
‘It’s Signora Lembo’s will,’ she explained, pointing to the monitor. He saw that she had died fifteen years before. ‘Her husband and daughters got her interest in the company, and almost all of the rest was divided among them.’ He looked at the copy of the will and saw what a considerable ‘rest’ it was. She tapped at a name, Sister Maria Rosaria Lembo-Malfa, who had received a modest sum. She was probably the nun who lived with them: perhaps nuns didn’t need large bequests.
‘They were still married?’ Brunetti asked. Her husband had left her for the physical therapist, Brunetti recalled, but a man of his wealth was unlikely to complicate his finances with a divorce.
‘Of course,’ Signorina Elettra answered, and hit a few keys, to display the last will and testament of Ludovico Lembo. Both the company and all of his remaining wealth were divided evenly between Lucrezia and Lavinia. There were no codicils, no other stipulations, just that simple statement of desire prefaced and followed by the usual decoration of legal terminology.
Griffoni moved her chair farther to the side and turned to him. ‘What did she tell you?’
‘That she worked for Lucrezia Lembo: that’s where the money’s coming from. The first’s a lie.’ She nodded her agreement and he went on. ‘It took her a while to understand about the usufrutto, but when she did, she said it wouldn’t matter.’
‘Which means?’ Signorina Elettra asked.
‘That she has a plan of some sort. Or a place to go. She’s not troubled in the least.’
‘How smart is she?’ Griffoni asked.
Brunetti had not thought about Cavanella in these terms, but his answer was immediate: ‘Not very.’ Seeing that this was insufficient, he went on. ‘She doesn’t think about the consequences of things. I doubt she plans anything or thinks anything through. Or she thinks she does, but doesn’t know how to do it.’
Silence fell as each of them tried to find a way to continue this conversation. Finally Brunetti said, ‘Beni Borsetta was in her room.’ He used the nickname because it was the more widely known; the lawyer’s real name had almost fallen into disuse apart from direct address or by someone meeting him for the first time.
‘Oddio,’ Griffoni exclaimed. ‘If we need proof that she’s stupid, there it is. Poor woman.’
A more reflective Signorina Elettra asked Brunetti, ‘Do you have any idea what he was doing there?’
‘Trying to earn money by persuading her to bring a case against someone, I’d guess,’ Griffoni interrupted to answer. Neither of the others tried to contradict her, even though she’d been in Venice only a few years.
Brunetti thought about the extent of Beni’s creative genius. Would he try to sue the pharmaceutical company for having sold a sleeping pill that was packaged like a sweet? The rescue service for being late? The social services for forty years of negligence?
Beni, he knew, was willing to take chances with his clients: there was no ambulance he would not chase. But he doubted that even a gambler like Beni would waste his time in litigation about any of those claims. No lawyer in his right mind, even one with a better reputation than Beni Borsetta’s, would go up against Big Pharma with such a weak case; the rescue services came when they came; and where was Davide’s birth certificate to authorize the intervention of the social services?
‘While you have that turned on,’ he said to Signorina Elettra, his choice of words causing her to close her eyes in momentary distress, ‘could you check the register of the lawyers and see if Avvocato Cresti is still listed?’ Walking to the Questura, he had recalled a few incidents in Beni’s variegated past when he had been threatened with expulsion from the union of lawyers and one time – it must have been ten years ago – when a judge had had him removed from the courtroom by the bailiffs when he refused to stop talking. Beni, in Brunetti’s estimation, was not a man who would learn from his mistakes, and certainly change of behaviour was not in his repertory.
He stepped back to give Signorina Elettra better access to the computer; Griffoni leaned to her left, better to see the screen, but did not move her chair. Brunetti folded his arms and studied the screen from behind them. Documents appeared on the monitor but remained there for such a brief time that he had no chance to read them. Griffoni, he noticed, occasionally wrote things in a notebook open on the desk beside her. Once she asked Signorina Elettra to explain something, nodded at her answer, muttering, ‘Very nice.’
After ten minutes, Signorina Elettra swivelled around and said, ‘If he’s practising law, he’s also breaking it. He’s been barred for three years, and the time isn’t up for another twenty-seven months.’
Beni might be a friend of Ana Cavanella’s, Brunetti supposed, were it not that Beni didn’t have any friends. The fact that his visit had taken place in the hospital made it even more certain that he had been in pursuit of work, not practising one of the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy. If he needed proof of Ana Cavanella’s lack of intelligence, the fact that she would have anything to do with Beni Borsetta was more than enough.
With a pleasant nod in the direction of the computer, Brunetti asked, ‘You think that thing could find his address and phone number?’
Avvocato Cresti, when Brunetti called him a short time later, sounded not in the least surprised to be contacted by an officer of the law. Indeed, he was vociferous in his expressions of goodwill towards the Commissario, whom he had met on various occasions and remembered well. Eager to be of service to the state, he seemed delighted to learn that all it requested of him was conversation. He asked for a moment to check his calendar and seemed even more delighted to discover that he had a convenient gap in his schedule and could pass by the Questura in an hour. That is, unless it suited the Commissario’s convenience that they meet in some other place?
‘My office is fine, Avvocato,’ Brunetti interrupted the stream of words to say and broke the connection before the lawyer could return to the floodgates. Brunetti had twice been a witness in trials where Beni had appeared for the defence and remembered clearly the feeling he had had, both times, of being suffocated by irrelevant detail. He had been in the courtrooms only briefly, but he had heard enough not to be surprised whe
n both of Beni’s clients lost their cases.
Griffoni had opted to remain downstairs with Signorina Elettra, who had started to explain to her the easiest way to access the records of two state agencies which had, until then, proven resistant to all legitimate requests for information on the holding company that owned the company that owned the chain of hotels that had displayed interest in acquiring the gutted factory. As he left the office, the last thing Brunetti had heard was Griffoni, saying, ‘It’s like one of those Russian dolls, isn’t it? There’s always something else inside.’
Brunetti went to the window and stared down at the water of the canal and, not for the first time, began to ask himself what in heaven’s name he had been doing for the last week. He had not broken any laws, he had not lied to any of the people he had spoken to, he had not subverted the cause of justice in any way. But he had also not learned anything significant about Davide Cavanella. His mother was a liar, his doctor knew more about him than he was willing to say, an old woman knew probably even more but would not say what that was, and the daughter of his mother’s former employer lived in a buffered world where she didn’t have to know or say anything and was probably paying her way out of having to.
To learn this little, he had avoided his professional responsibilities for a week, and had engaged or commandeered the help of other officers of the state, all in pursuit of what was becoming to seem like nothing more than a whim. And now he was about to drag in another member of the public but one who – unlike everyone else he had spoken to – was knowledgeable enough about the law to realize that his questions were not part of an authorized investigation.
