by Donna Leon
‘Of course.’
‘It’s no different just because the people you’re talking about are characters in a book, Guido. You should know that by now, that is if you’ve paid any attention to anything I’ve said during the last twenty years.’
He had, and she was right, but he didn’t want to have to say so. ‘Give it some thought, would you?’ he asked. ‘What she could have done with it?’
‘All right. Will you be home for lunch?’
‘Yes. It should be at the regular time.’
‘Good. Then I’ll cook something special.’
‘Marry me,’ he implored.
She hung up without answering.
He took the bank statement down to Signorina Elettra, who today wore a pair of jeans and a white shirt starched to pert attention. At her throat she wore a light blue scarf that could have been cashmere but could just as easily have been gossamer.
‘Pashmina?’ he asked, gesturing towards the scarf.
Her look suggested disdain for his ignorance, but her voice was calm. ‘If I might quote the latest FrenchVogue, sir, pashmina, is “mega-out”.’
‘And so?’ he asked, not at all cast down by her remark.
‘Cashmere and silk,’ she said, as one would speak of thorns and nettles.
‘It’s much what my wife says about literature: one is always safe with the classics.’ He laid the bank statement on her desk. ‘Ten million lire was transferred into Claudia Leonardo’s account every month from a bank in Geneva,’ he said, sure that this would capture her attention.
‘From which bank?’
‘It doesn’t say. Does that make a difference?’
She placed a finger on the bank statement and slid it closer. ‘It does if I want to find out about it. It’s much easier for me to do research at the private banks.’
‘Research?’ he inquired.
‘Research,’ she repeated.
‘Could you find out about this?’
‘The bank or the original source?’ she asked.
‘Both.’
She picked up the statement. ‘I could try. It might take some time. If it’s a private bank, well, even if it’s something hard to break into like Bank Hofmann, I should still be able to find something, Commissario.’
‘Good. I’d like this to start to make some sort of sense.’
‘It never will, though, will it?’
‘No, I suppose not,’ he agreed as he turned away.
Back in his office he decided to try his father-in-law again, to see if he’d had time to learn anything. But when he called, he was told that the Count had gone to Paris for the day, which left him no choice but to call Lele Bortoluzzi and see if there was anything further he could remember. There was no answer at his studio, so he tried the painter at home, where he found him.
After they exchanged pleasantries, Brunetti asked, ‘Do you remember a woman called Hedi - Hedwig - Jacobs, who ...?’
Lele broke in, ‘You still asking about Guzzardi, eh?’
‘Yes. And now about Frau Jacobs.’
‘I think that “Frau” is a courtesy title,’ Lele said. ‘There was never a Herr Jacobs in evidence.’
‘Did you know her?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes, but not well. We talked occasionally if we met somewhere. The thing I remember most is that someone as decent as she could be so gone on a person like Guzzardi. Anything he said was marvellous and anything he did was beyond question.’ The painter’s voice grew reflective. ‘I’ve seen lots of people lose their heads for love, but usually they maintain a little bit of sense. Not her, though. She would have gone down to hell for him if he’d asked her to.’
‘But they never married?’ Brunetti prodded.
‘He already had a wife, and a son, just a little kid then. He kept them both on a string, the wife and the Austrian. I’m sure they knew about each other, but, given what I know about Guzzardi, I’d guess they had no choice but to accept things the way they were.’
‘Did you know them?’
‘Who? The women, or the Guzzardis?’
‘Any of them?’
‘I knew the wife better. She was a cousin of my godmother’s son.’ Brunetti wasn’t at all sure just how close a link that would have constituted in Lele’s family, but the ease and familiarity with which the painter identified the relationship suggested it was no indifferent bond.
‘What was she like?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Why do you want to know all of this?’ Lele asked, making no attempt to disguise the fact that Brunetti’s curiosity had aroused his own.
‘Guzzardi’s name has come up in relation to something I’m working on.’
‘Can you tell me what?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Brunetti answered.
‘All right,’ Lele said, accepting this. ‘The wife put up with it, as I said. After all, they were difficult times and he was a powerful man.’
‘And when he wasn’t powerful any more?’
‘You mean after the war? When they arrested him?’
‘Yes.’
‘She dropped him, as fast as she could. I think I remember being told that she took up with a British officer. I can’t remember now. Anyway, she left the city with her son, and with the soldier.’
‘And?’
‘I never heard a thing about her again, and I would have, if she’d come back.’
‘And the Austrian?’
‘You have to understand that I was really little more than a kid myself then. What was I when the war ended? Eighteen? Nineteen? And a lot of time has passed, so much of what I remember is a mixture between what I really saw and heard and what, over the years, I’ve heard people say. The older I get, the harder it is to distinguish between the two.’
Brunetti wondered if he was going to be treated to a meditation on age, but then Lele continued, ‘I think I saw her first at a gallery opening. But that was before she met him.’
‘What was she doing in Venice?’
‘I forget exactly, but I have a vague memory that it had something to do with her father. He worked here or had an office here. Something like that, I think.’
‘Do you remember anything about her?’
‘She was lovely. Of course, I was more than ten years younger than she was, so I might as well have lived on the moon as far as she was concerned, but I remember that she was beautiful.’
‘And was she drawn to him by his power, too, like the wife?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No, that was the strange thing. She really loved him. In fact I always had the impression, or else the belief was there, in the air, as it were, that she had different ideas from his but put up with his because she loved him.’
‘And when he was arrested? Do you remember anything about that?’
‘No, not clearly. I think she tried to buy his way out, either as a return for favours or with money. At least there was a rumour that she did.’
‘But if he went to San Servolo, then she wasn’t very successful, was she?’
‘No, he’d made too many enemies, the bastard, so no one could help him, not in the end.’
‘What had he done that was so bad?’ Brunetti asked, still bemused by the ferocity of Lele’s feelings and thinking of the enormities committed by so many men, most of whom had danced away from the war and from any trace of guilt.
‘He stole what was most precious from a lot of people.’
Brunetti waited, hoping that Lele himself would hear just how weak this sounded. At last he asked, ‘He’s been dead, what, more than forty years?’
‘So what? It doesn’t change the fact that he was a bastard and deserved to die in a place where people ate their own shit.’
Once again taken aback by Lele’s anger, Brunetti found it difficult to respond. The painter, however, spared him further awkwardness by saying, This has nothing to do with you, Guido. You can ask anything you want about him.’ After a pause, he added, ‘It’s because he touched my family.’
‘I’m
sorry that happened,’ Brunetti said.
‘Yes, well,’ Lele began but found no way to finish the sentence and so left it at that.
‘If you think of anything else about her, would you call me?’
‘Of course. And I’ll ask around, see what anyone else can remember.’
‘Thanks,’
‘It’s nothing, Guido.’ Briefly it seemed as if Lele were going to say something more, but he made an affectionate farewell and put down the phone.
* * * *
Lunch, indeed, was something special. Perhaps it was talk of three hundred and sixty million lire that had driven Paola to excess, for she had bought an entire sea bass and baked it with fresh artichokes, lemon juice and rosemary. With it she served a platter the size of an inner tube filled with tiny roast potatoes, also lightly sprinkled with rosemary. Then, to clear the palate, a salad of rucola and radicchio. They finished with baked apples.
‘It’s a good thing you have to go to the university three mornings a week and can’t do this to us every day,’ Brunetti said as he declined a second helping of apples.
‘Am I meant to take that as a compliment?’ Paola asked.
Before Brunetti could answer, Chiara asked for another apple with sufficient enthusiasm to confirm that her father’s remark had indeed been a compliment.
The children astonished their parents by offering to do the dishes. Paola went back to her study and Brunetti, taking with him a glass of grappa, followed her shortly after. ‘We really ought to get a new sofa, don’t you think?’ he said, kicking off his shoes and stretching out on the endangered piece of furniture.
‘If I thought I’d ever find anything as comfortable as that one,’ Paola said, ‘I suppose I’d buy it.’ She studied the sofa and her supine husband for some time then said, ‘Perhaps I could just have it re-covered.’
‘Umm,’ Brunetti agreed, eyes closed, hands clasped around the stem of his glass.
‘Have you found out anything?’ Paola asked, not at all interested in the papers that awaited her.
‘Only the money. And Rizzardi said she was a virgin.’
‘In the third millennium,’ Paola exclaimed, unable to hide her surprise. ‘Mirabile dictu.’ After a time, she amended this to, ‘Well, perhaps not so astonishing.’
Eyes still closed, Brunetti asked, ‘Why?’
‘There was a kind of simplicity about her, a complete lack of sophistication. Maybe you could call it artlessness, maybe innocence,’ she said, then added, ‘whatever that is.’
‘That sounds very speculative,’ Brunetti observed.
‘I know,’ she admitted. ‘It’s just an impression.’
‘Do you still have her papers?’
‘The ones she wrote for me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course. They’re all in the archive.’
‘Would it make any sense to look through them?’
Paola considered this for a long time before answering. ‘Probably not. If I read them now, or you did, we’d be looking for things that might not necessarily be there. I think it’s enough to trust my general impression that she was a decent, generous girl who tended to believe in human goodness.’
‘And who was consequently stabbed to death.’
‘Consequently?’
‘No, I just said that,’ Brunetti admitted. ‘I’d hate to think one was the consequence of the other.’ Though both of them prided themselves in seeing these same qualities in their daughter, neither of them, perhaps out of modesty, though more likely out of superstitious fear, dared to say it. Instead, Brunetti placed his glass on the floor and drifted off to sleep, while Paola put on her glasses and drifted into the sort of trance state that the reading of student papers is bound to induce in the adult mind.
* * * *
14
He stopped in Signorina Elettra’s office when he got back to the Questura and found her on the phone, speaking French. She held up her hand to signal to him to wait, said something else, laughed, and hung up.
He refused to ask about the call and said, ‘Has Bocchese brought up those papers?’
‘Yes, sir. And I’ve got people working on it.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘My friend is going to have a look,’ she said, nodding in the direction of the phone, ‘but I doubt he’ll have anything for me until after the banks close.’
‘Geneva?’ he asked.
‘Oui’
Manfully, he resisted the temptation either to comment or to inquire further. ‘I’ll be in my office,’ he said and went back upstairs.
He stood at the window, gazing at the two yellow cranes that rose above the church of San Lorenzo. They’d been there for so long that Brunetti had come to think of them almost as a pair of angel wings soaring up from either side of the church. He thought they’d been there when he first came to the Questura, but surely no restoration could possibly take that long. Had he, he wondered, ever seen them move, or were they ever in a position different from the one in which they were today? He devoted a great deal of time to these considerations, all the while letting the problem of Claudia Leonardo percolate in some other part of his mind.
The angel wings, he realized, reminded him of an angel that appeared in a painting that hung on the wall behind Signora Jacobs’s chair, a painting of the Flemish school, the angel jaundiced and unhappy as if it had been appointed guardian of a person of limitless rectitude and found the assignment dull.
He dialled Lele’s number again. When the painter answered, Brunetti said only, ‘Has there ever been talk that the Austrian woman might have those paintings and drawings in her home?’
He thought Lele would ask him why he wanted to know, but the painter answered simply, ‘Of course, there’s always been talk. No one, so far as I know, has ever been inside, so it’s only talk, and you know how those things are. People always talk, even if they don’t know anything, and they always exaggerate.’ There was a long pause, and Brunetti could almost hear Lele turning this over in his mind. ‘And I expect,’ he went on, ‘that if anyone did get inside and see anything he wouldn’t say so.’
‘Why not?’
Lele laughed, the same old cynical snort Brunetti had heard for decades. ‘Because they’d hope that if they kept quiet no one else would be curious about what she might have.’
‘I still don’t understand.’
‘She’s not going to live for ever, you know, Guido.’
‘And?’
‘And if she’s got things, she might want to sell some of them before she dies.’
‘Do people talk about where they might have come from?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Ahhh.’ Lele’s long sigh could be read as satisfaction that Brunetti had finally thought to ask the right question or as a sign of his delight in human weakness.
‘That can’t be far to look, can it?’ the painter finally asked by way of response.
‘Guzzardi?’
‘Of course.’
‘From what you’ve said about her, she doesn’t seem the kind of person who would have anything to do with that sort of thing.’
‘Guido,’ Lele said with unaccustomed severity, ‘your years with the police should have taught you that people are far more willing to profit from a crime than to commit it.’ Before Brunetti could object, Lele went on, ‘Dare I mention the good Cardinal and Prince of the Church currently under investigation for collusion with the Mafia?’
Brunetti had spent decades listening to Lele in this vein, but he suddenly had no patience for it, and so he cut him off. ‘See what you can find out, all right?’
Apparently feeling no ill will at having been so summarily interrupted, the painter asked only, ‘Why are you so curious?’
Brunetti himself didn’t know or couldn’t see the reason clearly. ‘Because there’s nothing else I can think of,’ he admitted.
‘That’s not the sort of remark that would make me have much confidence in public officials,’ Lele said.
‘Is there anything that could ever make you have confidence in public officials?’
‘The very idea,’ the painter said and was gone.
