by Donna Leon
‘Yes.’
‘That’s what he said?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it possible that he might have been talking about something else? Have you thought about this?’ he asked.
Her look was utterly candid, and she said, ‘But that’s what he told me he meant. That he would allow her to come back, and if she behaved he wouldn’t do anything.’
‘Why would he want her to come back?’
She smiled here, having been quicker than he to ask this question and understand the reason. ‘He said he didn’t want there to be any talk, that he didn’t want me to be hurt by what people might say.’ She smiled at this proof of her husband’s consideration and, ineluctably, love.
‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘But then, when he told you how frightened he was of his weakness, that she could tempt him again, how did you react?’
‘I was proud of him, that he would be so honest with me and that I was worth so much to him. That he would confess to me.’
‘Of course,’ Brunetti muttered, understanding just what her husband’s confession really had meant to achieve and how successful he had been. ‘And did he ask you anything?’ Brunetti asked. When she seemed reluctant to answer, he changed the words a bit, ‘Did he ask for your help?’
That brought a smile. ‘Yes. He wanted me to go and talk to her and try to make her agree to stay away from him.’
‘Yes, I can see that that would be wise,’ Brunetti said, seeing only too well her husband’s wisdom in making the request. ‘And did you go?’
‘Not for a few more nights. I told him I trusted him to be strong. But then, a few days later, he came and told me that she had started again, had ... had touched him again, and he didn’t know how long he would be strong.’ Again, her voice broke in horror at the girl’s behaviour.
‘And did he ask you again to go and talk to her?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He didn’t have to. I knew it was what I had to do, to go and tell her to leave him alone and not tempt him.’
‘And?’ ’
‘And I went that night,’ she said, folding her hands in front of her on the table, interlacing her fingers.
‘And?’ Brunetti asked.
‘You know what happened,’ she said with dismissive contempt for this charade.
‘I’m afraid I do, Signora, but you have to say it.’
‘I killed her,’ she said, voice tight. ‘She let me in and I started to talk to her. I have my pride, so I didn’t say that Maxwell had asked me. I told her she’d have to stay away from him.’
‘And what happened?’
‘She told me that I was wrong, that she had no interest in him, that I had it all backwards and it was Maxwell who was bothering her.’ She smiled confidently here. ‘But he’d warned me that she’d lie and tell me that, so I was ready for it.’
‘Then?’
‘Then she said things about him, terrible things that I couldn’t listen to.’
‘What things?’
‘That she knew that the idea of those papers about Guzzardi was just a way for Maxwell and my father to get money, that she’d told Maxwell she was going to tell Signora Jacobs about it.’ She stopped, and Brunetti heard a distinct hardening in her voice as she said, ‘And she made up lies about other girls and what people in the Biblioteca said about him.’
‘And then?’
‘And then she said the idea of sex with him made her sick.’ Her tone struck out, even to the edge of doom, and he knew, without her having to tell him, that it was this that had driven her over the edge to violence.
‘The weapon, Signora?’
‘She was eating an apple. The knife was on the table.’ Just like in Tosca, Brunetti thought. He shivered.
‘She didn’t scream?’ he asked.
‘No. I think she was too surprised. She had turned away for something, I don’t know what, and when she turned around, I did it.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said. He decided not to ask for details: it was more important that the typist outside be given the tape as soon as possible so that a written statement could be prepared for her to sign. But his curiosity got the better of him, and he asked, ‘And Signora Jacobs?’
‘What about her?’ she asked, honestly puzzled.
Instantly Brunetti abandoned the question he was about to ask as well as his suspicion that Signora Jacobs had been murdered.
‘I’m afraid it was too much for her,’ the woman said and then surprised Brunetti by adding, ‘I’m sorry that she died.’
‘Are you sorry you killed the girl, Signora?’
She shook her head a number of times in calm, determined denial. ‘No, not at all. I’m glad I did it.’
Obviously she had forgotten, or forgiven, her husband’s supposed betrayal, just that afternoon, a false betrayal that had catapulted her into her own true self-betrayal.
Suddenly Brunetti’s spirit was overcome with the weight of human folly and misery, and he stood, gave the time, said the interview was terminated, and left the room to go and have her confession typed out.
* * * *
27
Brunetti succeeded in having Signora Ford sign her confession. He stood in the room with the secretary who transcribed it and then took it back to the interview room and to the waiting woman, who signed and dated it. No sooner had she done so than her husband arrived with a lawyer who protested that he had not been present while his client was being questioned. Ford had obviously thought to pull out all of the stops with the professional classes and had brought along a doctor as well; he demanded to see his patient and, after giving her a cursory glance, said that it was necessary that she be hospitalized immediately. The two of them struck Brunetti as looking like a pair of salt and pepper shakers: both tall men and very thin, the doctor had white hair and pale skin, while the lawyer, Filippo Boscaro, had dark hair and a thick black moustache.
Brunetti asked the reason for the hospitalization, and the doctor, who stood in the interview room with a protective hand on Signora Ford’s shoulder, said that his patient was obviously suffering from shock and was hardly in a position to answer any questions.
At this, Signora Ford glanced up at him, then at her husband, who knelt beside her, his hands wrapped protectively around hers. ‘Don’t worry, Eleonora,’ he said, ‘I’ll take care of you.’
The woman leaned towards him, whispered something Brunetti could not hear. Ford kissed her softly on the cheek and she looked up at Brunetti, her face aglow with vindicated love. Brunetti said nothing, waiting to see what Ford would suggest.
The Library Director got awkwardly to his feet, unable to use his hands, which were still as much the captives as the captors of his wife’s. When he was standing, he helped her to her feet and then put a supporting arm around her. Turning to the doctor he said, ‘Giulio, will you take her?’
Before the doctor could answer, Brunetti interrupted, ‘I’m afraid she can’t leave unless a policewoman goes along with her.’ The doctor, the librarian and the lawyer competed in displaying their umbrage at this, but Brunetti opened the door to the corridor and told the officer standing there to see that a woman officer be sent up immediately.
The lawyer, whom Brunetti recognized but about whom he knew little more than he was a criminal lawyer, said, ‘I hope you realize, Commissario, that anything my client might have said during the time she was here is hardly to be admitted as evidence.’
‘Evidence of what?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I beg your pardon?’ the lawyer said.
‘Evidence of what?’ Brunetti repeated.
At a loss, all the lawyer could think of to say was, ‘Of anything.’
‘Could it be used as evidence that she had been here, do you think, avvocato?’ Brunetti asked politely. ‘Or perhaps as evidence that she knew what her name was?’ Brunetti knew that nothing could come of baiting the lawyer, but still he could not stop himself from offending him.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Co
mmissario,’ Boscaro said, ‘but I do think you are deliberately trying to provoke me.’
Brunetti, who was forced to agree with him, turned to the doctor. ‘Could you tell me your name, Dottore?’ he asked.
‘Giulio Rampazzo,’ the white-haired man said.
‘And you are Signora Ford’s regular doctor?’
‘I’m a psychiatrist,’ Dr Rampazzo said.
‘I see,’ Brunetti answered. ‘And has Signora Ford been a patient of yours for some time?’
Her husband lost his patience here. Tightening his arm around his wife he led her towards the door. ‘I don’t see the sense of any of this. I’m taking my wife out of here.’
Brunetti knew better than to oppose him, especially when the man had both a doctor and a lawyer in tow. He was glad, however, to see a uniformed woman officer appear just outside the door. ‘Officer, you’re to accompany this woman.’
She saluted and said, ‘Yes, sir,’ without bothering to ask where she was to go with the woman or what she was meant to do in her company.
‘Which hospital are you taking her to, Dottore?’ Brunetti asked. Rampazzo hunted for an answer, trying not to look at Ford for a clue. Seeing this, Brunetti said, ‘I’ll have a launch take you to the Ospedale Civile, then.’ Nodding to the officer who was still there, he sent him off to call for the launch.
As he walked in front of them down the steps towards the entrance of the Questura, Brunetti thought of the best way to handle this. With a doctor there, insisting that the woman was in shock, Ford would get her out of the Questura; Brunetti knew it was useless to oppose that. But the more normal and peaceful her departure was made to seem, the more weight would be given to the validity of her confession, during which she had certainly remained perfectly calm and coherent.
In front of the building, the police launch was waiting, motor throbbing idly. Brunetti stopped at the door and did not follow them from the building. The same uniformed policeman helped the two women and then the three men on board, then stepped on deck after them. When the launch moved off, Brunetti went back inside to make the phone calls he hoped would ensure that Signora Ford did not escape the bureaucratic labyrinth into which her confession had placed her.
* * * *
Intermittently during the next months the attention of Venice was focused on that labyrinth and the slothlike progress - if that is not too wildly energetic a word - through it of the cases of Claudia Leonardo’s murder and Hedwig Jacobs’s possessions. Both had burst upon the public attention like comets, lighting up the front pages of local and national newspapers. All talk of other crimes or complexities was driven to the bottom of the front page by the sensational confession to murder by the daughter of one of the best known notaries in the city and the discovery of a patrimony in paintings and other art pieces in the modest home of a poor old woman.
Speculation ran rife about the first case: jealousy, passion, adultery; as to the second, the purported emotions were more muted: loyalty, love, devotion. Both stories soon shifted with their principals: Signora Ford was returned to her home, and her story moved to the inner pages; Signora Jacobs’s story was buried, as she had been buried in the Protestant cemetery, but not before Brunetti had come to regret his error in believing her to have been murdered. Claudia’s death had killed her, not Claudia’s killer.
The case, sometimes called the Leonardo case and sometimes the Ford case, chugged on. The confession was called into question, accused of being yet another example of the stormtrooper mentality of the authorities, but finally, after six months of legal wrangling, was admitted as valid. But by then Doctor Rampazzo and his colleagues had argued that this was a woman driven beyond herself by jealousy. Not only beyond herself, but beyond all possibility of responsibility. Boscaro proved to be a man worthy of his reputation, and no doubt of his fee, by presenting this argument to a board of judges, who declared that Signora Ford was indeed in a position of diminished responsibility when she went to speak to Claudia Leonardo. What had happened then ... As Signor Ford had told his wife: human flesh was weak and people did things they did not want to do.
Brunetti, caught up in another case, this time of even more corruption at the Casino, followed Claudia’s murder in the papers and by means of his friends in the magistracy, knowing himself helpless to effect any change in the way things would play themselves out.
The objects in the Jacobs case were inventoried again, this time by representatives of the Ministry of the Treasury and the Sovrintendenza delle Belle Arti. Claudia’s mother was declared Claudia’s legal heir, and that in turn made her heir to Frau Jacobs’s possessions. Her continued absence, however, led to the opening of a waiting period of seven years, at the end of which she would be declared legally dead and possession would pass to the state. The paintings and ceramics, and the famous drawings that had, or had not, once belonged to the Swiss Consul and which now did or did not belong to Claudia’s mother, all were taken to Rome. There, they were placed in storage and the seven years of the waiting period began to count themselves out.
One night, as they sat in the living room, Paola looked up from her book and said, surprising him, ‘Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce.’
‘What?’ Brunetti asked.
She met his glance, her eyes slightly magnified by the lenses of her reading glasses. ‘Nothing, really,’ she said. ‘It’s something in a book.’
* * * *
Six months after that, Gianpaolo Filipetto died quietly in his sleep and, having been a parishoner of the church of San Giovanni in Bragora, he was buried there with all the pomp and ceremony due to his advanced years and his stature in the city.
Brunetti arrived late and missed the Requiem Mass, but he was on time to mingle with the people who emerged from the church and stood, respectful and silent, waiting for the coffin and the mourners to appear. Six men carried the dark mahogany coffin, its lid buried under an enormous blanket of red and white roses. The first to emerge from the dimness of the church was the pastor, a man bent under the weight of years almost as heavy as those of Filipetto. Behind him came Filipetto’s daughter, released from house arrest to attend the funeral, her right arm held tightly by her husband. Ford had gained weight in the last few months and all but glowed with health and well-being, but she had grown even more angular and stick-like.
Ford kept his eyes on his wife’s face as they walked; she kept hers on the ground. The crowd parted in advance of the pallbearers as they made their slow way out into the campo. A man walked quickly into the campo from the direction of the bacino, where the boat that would take the coffin to the cemetery was moored. The man saw the coffin, approached the pastor and had a word with him, and the old priest turned and pointed to Ford. The man signalled to Ford, who left his wife with a soft word and went to talk to him.
Brunetti took this opportunity to approach the woman.
‘Signora,’ he said as he came up to her.
She looked up, recognized him instantly, but said nothing. Brunetti saw that she had aged more years than months had passed; her cheeks were gaunt hollows on either side of a withered mouth. It was as though she had become a stranger to sleep.
She looked down and spoke so softly he had to bend to hear what she said, ‘Tell me what you have to tell me before he comes back.’ She spoke hurriedly, glancing to the left, where her husband stood talking to the other man.
‘Have you read all of the papers in your case, Signora?’ he asked.
She nodded.
‘Have you read the autopsy report?’
Her eyes widened at this, and then she closed them for an instant. He took that as a yes, but he wanted to hear her say it.
‘Have you read it?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Then you know she was a virgin.’
Her mouth opened, and he saw then that she had lost her two bottom front teeth and not bothered to replace them. ‘He told me . . .’ she began to say but then stopped, looking anxiously off towards her husband.
‘I’m sure he did, Signora,’ Brunetti said, and turned away, leaving her to the men in her life.
