by Donna Leon
Knowing that he was helpless to dismiss this feeling, he waited for it to pass and a few minutes later he rang the bell. After some time, a deep voice, but still a woman’s voice, called over the entry phone, ‘Who is it?’
‘I’ve come to talk to you, Signora Jacobs,’ was the best he could think of. ,
‘I don’t talk to people,’ she answered and replaced the phone.
Brunetti rang the bell again, keeping his finger on it until he heard her demand, ‘Who are you?’ The tone was peremptory, without uncertainty or fear.
‘I’m Commissario Guido Brunetti, Signora, from the police. I’ve come to talk to you.’
There followed a long pause. Finally, she asked, ‘About what?’
‘Claudia Leonardo.’
The noise he heard, or thought he heard, could simply have been static; it could just as easily have been her breathing. The door snapped open and he went in. The floor of the entrance hall was green with mould, lit only by a dim bulb in a filthy glass case. He started up the stairs, the green of the mould growing lighter as he rose. At the first landing there was another bulb, no brighter, which dimly illuminated the octagonal marble medallions that patterned the floor. A single door, a thick metal porta blindata, stood open to his left and just inside it was a tall, painfully stooped woman, her white hair arranged in an elaborate crown of braids of the sort he was familiar with from photos from the Thirties and Forties. She leaned forward, her hands wrapped around the ivory handle of a walking stick. Her eyes were grey with just the faintest touch of the cloudiness of age, but no less filled with suspicion for that.
‘I’m afraid I have very bad news for you, Signora Jacobs,’ he said, halting outside the door. He watched her face for some response, but she gave none.
‘You better come inside to give it to me so I can be sitting down when I hear it,’ she said. The longer sentence exposed the Teutonic underpinnings of her speech. ‘It’s my heart, and I’m not at all steady on my feet any more. I need to sit.’
She turned back into the apartment. Brunetti closed the door and followed her. His first breath proved to him that the tobacco dealer was right: if he could have walked into an ashtray, the smell would have been no stronger. He wondered when a window had last been opened in this apartment, so pervasive was the sour smell.
She led him down a wide corridor, and at first Brunetti kept his eyes on her retreating back, concerned that even the thought of bad news might cause her to falter or fall. But she seemed to proceed steadily, if slowly, so he began to pay attention to his surroundings. Looking around him, he stopped dead, assaulted by the beauty he saw spread around him as if by a profligate hand.
The walls on either side of the corridor were crowded with rows of paintings and drawings, lined up shoulder to shoulder like people waiting for a bus. Like those random waiters, the paintings in no way resembled one another: he saw what had to be a small Degas of the familiar seated dancer; what looked like a pear but only a pear as Cezanne could paint a pear; a thick-lidded Madonna of the Sienese school; and what was surely one of Goya’s drawings of a firing squad.
As he stood, petrified as Lot’s wife, a voice said from somewhere to his left, ‘Are you going to come and tell me what it is you have to say, Commissario?’
He turned away from the pictures, eyes skimming over what might have been a tiny Memling, a set of Otto Dix drawings, and an unidentifiable and particularly unerotic nude, and followed the voice into the living room. Again his senses were assaulted: the smell was heavier, thicker, so strong that he could feel it beginning to sink into the cloth of his jacket; and the objects on display had lost even the negligible order imposed upon those along the walls of the corridor. One entire wall was covered with Persian or Indian miniatures in gold frames: there must have been thirty of them. The wall to his left held three tiles that even his eye could distinguish as Iznik as well as a large collection of other Middle Eastern ceramic plates and tiles, but the same wall also held a life-sized wooden crucifix. To his right he saw pen and ink drawings, but before he could begin to examine them closely, his attention was drawn to the old woman as she sank heavily into a velvet-covered armchair.
The chair stood in the centre of a carpet that appeared to be an Esfahani: only fine silk would give the luminous sheen in the small portion at the far end that he could see. All trace of silk, in fact all trace of anything at all, was obscured by a wide arc of ground-in ash that spread in a half-circle beneath and in front of her chair. Automatically, with a gesture that seemed as instinctive and rhythmic as breathing, she took a blue packet of Nazionali from the top of the table beside her and lit one with a cheap plastic lighter.
After she had inhaled deeply, she said, ‘Will you tell me now what it is you’ve come to tell me?’
‘It’s Claudia Leonardo,’ he said. ‘She’s been killed.’
The hand with the cigarette fell, as if forgotten, beside her. She closed her eyes and, had her spine permitted it, her head would have fallen against the back of the high chair. Instead, the gesture merely raised her head until she was looking directly across at him. When he noticed that the angle seemed difficult for her, he moved a chair opposite her and sat down so that she could lower her head and still see him clearly.
‘Oh, God. I thought it couldn’t happen,’ she said under her breath, perhaps not even conscious that she had spoken out loud. She stared a moment longer at Brunetti, then raised a hand with an effort and covered her eyes.
Brunetti was about to ask her what she meant when he noticed smoke rising from beside her. Immediately, he stood and moved towards her. She seemed not the least interested in the sudden, possibly menacing, action. Brunetti picked up the cigarette and stabbed with his foot at the smouldering patch of silk.
Signora Jacobs seemed entirely unaware that he was there, or of what he was doing. ‘Are you all right, Signora?’ he said, placing one hand on her shoulder. She gave no sign that she heard him. ‘Signora,’ he repeated, increasing the pressure of his hand.
The hand she held across her eyes slapped down on to her lap, but her eyes remained closed. He moved away from her a little, willing her to open them. When she did, she said, ‘In the kitchen. Pills on the table.’
He ran towards the back of the apartment and down another corridor, this one lined with books. He saw a sink through a door on the left, tossed her cigarette into it and grabbed the single bottle of pills that stood on the table. He paused to fill a glass with water and went back to her. He handed her the bottle and waited while she opened it and tipped out two white pills the size of aspirin. She put them into her mouth and held up a hand to reject the proffered glass of water. She closed her eyes again and sat, utterly quiet. When he saw her relax and some hint of colour begin to seep into her face, he was unable to resist the temptation to look again at the walls.
He was used to manifestations of great wealth, though his perhaps stubborn insistence that the family live on their salaries alone kept the opulence of the Falier family at bay. Nevertheless a few paintings - personal possessions of Paola’s, like the Canaletto in the kitchen - had managed to slip into the house, in the manner of homeless cats on rainy nights. He was familiar with his father-in-law’s collection, as well as those of some of the Count’s friends, to make no mention of what he had observed in the homes of wealthy suspects he had questioned. Nothing he had previously seen, however, could have prepared him for this grandiose promiscuity: paintings, ceramics, carvings, prints jostled one another as if competing for pride of place. Order did not exist, but beauty overwhelmed him.
He glanced at Signora Jacobs and saw that she was looking at him as she groped for her cigarettes. He moved around the chair and sat down again while she lit a cigarette and drew on it deeply, almost defiantly. ‘What happened?’
‘Her flatmate came home this morning and found her in the apartment. She was dead, probably killed some time yesterday evening.’
‘How?’
‘Stabbed’
‘Who did it?’
‘It might have been a thief or a burglar.’ Even as he spoke, he realized how unconvincing this sounded.
‘Things like that don’t happen here,’ she said. Without bothering to look to see if there were an ashtray beside her, she flicked the ash from her cigarette on to the carpet at her feet.
‘No, they usually don’t, Signora. But so far we’ve found nothing that might suggest another explanation.’
‘What have you found?’ she demanded, surprising him by the speed with which she had recovered her composure.
‘Her address book.’
Intelligence flared in her pale eyes. ‘And I just happened to be the first person you came to see?’
‘No, Signora. I came to see you because, in a sense, I already knew about you.’
‘Knew what about me?’ she asked, unsuccessfully attempting to disguise the alarm anyone in Italy would feel at the idea that the police knew something about them.
‘That Claudia thought of you as her grandmother and that you wanted her to find out about obtaining an official reversal of the conviction of someone who had died on San Servolo.’ He saw no reason to hide this from her: sooner or later he would have to question her about this and he might as well begin now, while the shock of what she had just learned might lower her resistance to answering questions of any sort.
She dropped the cigarette on to the carpet and stamped it out, then immediately lit another. Her gestures were slow and careful: she must be, he estimated, well into her eighties. She took three hungry puffs at the cigarette, as though she had not just finished the other. Without asking, Brunetti got up and went to a table behind her and returned with the lid of a jar, which seemed to serve as an ashtray. He set it beside her.
Not bothering to thank him, she said, ‘Are you the person she talked to?’
‘Yes.’
‘I told her to go to a lawyer. I offered to pay for it.’
‘She did. He told her it would cost her five million lire.’
She sniffed at the sum, condemning it to eternal insignificance. ‘So she came to you?’
‘In a way, Signora. First she went to my wife, who is one of her professors at the university, and asked her to ask me. But Claudia was apparently not satisfied with the answer I asked my wife to give her, so she came to the Questura to ask me directly.’
‘Yes, she’d do that,’ the woman said with a smile that barely touched her lips but warmed her voice. ‘What did you tell her when you spoke to her?’
‘Essentially what I’d told my wife: that I couldn’t give an answer until I had a clearer idea of the crime involved.’
‘Did she tell you who it was for?’ the woman asked, this time failing to keep the suspicion from her voice.
‘No,’ Brunetti said. It was a lie, but taking unfair advantage of a sick old woman in shock at the death of someone she loved was just part of the job, after all.
The woman turned her eyes away from him and looked at the wall to her right, the one covered with ceramics. It seemed to Brunetti that she did not see them and was unaware of any of the objects in the room. When she hadn’t spoken for a long time, he was no longer sure that she was aware of his presence.
Finally she turned back to him. ‘I think that’s all,’ she said.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Brunetti asked politely, genuinely not understanding what she meant.
‘That’s all. That’s all I want to know, and that’s all I want to say to you.’
‘I wish it were that simple, Signora,’ he said with real sympathy. ‘But I’m afraid you have little choice. This is a murder investigation, and you have the duty to answer questions put to you by the police.’
She laughed. It was a noise devoid of all possibility of amusement or pleasure, but it seemed the only response she could find to a statement which was, to her, so obviously absurd.
‘Signor Commissario,’ she said, ‘I am eighty-three years old, and as my need for those pills ought to have shown you, I am in poor health.’ Before he could respond, she went on, ‘Even more fortunate, at least in the face of my refusal to speak to you further, is the fact that there does not exist the doctor who would not certify that any questions you might ask me in this matter would put my life at risk.’
‘You make it sound as if you don’t believe it,’ he observed.
‘Oh, I do believe it. I was raised in a school far harder than you Italians have any concept of, and I therefore have never been a crybaby, but, believe me, if you could feel how my heart is pounding now, you would know that this is true. Your questions would put my life at risk. I mention the doctor only to make clear to you the lengths to which I will go in order not to continue to speak to you.’
‘Is it the questions that would put your life in danger, Signora, or the answers?’
Suddenly aware that her cigarette had gone out, she tossed it to the floor and reached for the packet. ‘You can see yourself out, Commissario,’ she said, her voice rich with the command that lingers after a youth spent in a house where there are many servants.
* * * *
12
Brunetti’s work had exposed him to the many forms in which despair manifested itself, and so he wasted no more time in what he knew would be a vain attempt to persuade Signora Jacobs to tell him more about the murdered girl.
He left her apartment and decided to walk back to the Questura, using the time to wonder how, even if, the old woman and her link to the Guzzardis might be connected to Claudia’s death. Why should criminal actions committed decades before the girl’s birth be connected to what might have been a simple robbery gone wrong? Simple thieves, the voice of experience and habitual scepticism whispered in his ear, do not carry knives, and simple thieves do not murder the people who discover them at their work; push them aside, perhaps, in attempting to flee, but not stab them until they are dead.
He found himself looking across at the campanile of San Giorgio, studying the angel who perched atop it, restored now after having been blasted to flame by lightning some years ago. Realizing that he must have walked past the Questura without noticing where he was, he turned and went back towards San Lorenzo. The officer at the door saluted him normally and gave no sign that he had seen his superior walk by a few minutes ago.
Brunetti paused outside Signorina Elettra’s office and peered inside, relieved to see an abundance of flowers on the windowsill. A step further confirmed his hope that more of them stood on her desk: yellow roses, at least two dozen of them. How he had prayed in the last months that she be returned to her shameless depredation of the city’s finances by claiming these exploding bouquets as ordinary office expenses. Every bud, every blossom was rich with the odour of the misappropriation of public funds; Brunetti breathed in deeply and sighed in relief.
She sat, as he had hoped, behind her desk, and he was happy to see she was wearing a green cashmere sweater; he was even happier to see that she was reading a magazine. ‘What is it today, Signorina?’ he asked, ‘Famiglia Cristiana?’
She looked up but she did not smile. ‘No, sir, I always give that to my aunt.’
‘Is she religious?’ Brunetti inquired.
‘No, sir. She has a parakeet.’ She shut the magazine, preventing him from seeing what it was. He hoped it was Vogue.
‘Has Vianello told you?’ he asked.
‘Poor girl. How old was she?’
‘I’m not sure, no more than twenty.’
Neither commented on the awful waste.
‘He said she was one of your wife’s students.’
Brunetti nodded. ‘I’ve just been to see an old woman who knew her.’
‘Do you have any idea of what happened?’
‘It could have been a robbery.’ When he saw her reaction, he added, ‘Or it could have been something else entirely.’
‘Such as?’
‘Boyfriend. Drugs.’
‘Vianello said you had spoken to her,’ Signorina Elettra said. ‘Does either of those seem p
ossible?’
‘My first impulse is to say no, but I don’t understand the world any more. Anything is possible. Of anyone.’
‘Do you really believe that, sir?’ she asked, and her tone suggested that her question held greater significance than his remark, which he had made without thinking.
‘No,’ he said after some thought. ‘I suppose I don’t believe it. In the end, there are some people it makes sense to trust.’
