Anonymous Venetian

by Donna Leon

  This time it was Brunetti who took a small step away from the other man. He heard the other one snort at this and turned to pick up the folder, which he had placed on the table beside him.

  ’Signor Crespo, I’d like you to look at a picture of someone and tell me if you recognize him.’

  ‘I’d be glad to look at anything you chose to show me,’ Crespo said, putting heavy emphasis on ‘you’ and moving his hand inside the collar of his shirt to caress his neck.

  Brunetti opened the folder and handed Crespo the artist’s drawing of the dead man. Crespo glanced down at it for less than a second, looked up at Brunetti, smiled, and said, ‘I haven’t an idea of who he could be.’ He held the picture out to Brunetti, who refused to take it.

  ‘I’d like you to take a better look at the picture, Signor Crespo.’

  ‘He told you he didn’t know him,’ the other one said from across the room.

  Brunetti ignored him. ‘The man was beaten to death, and we need to find out who he was, so I’d appreciate it if you’d take another look at him, Signor Crespo.’

  Crespo closed his eyes for a moment and moved his hand to brush a wayward curl behind his left ear. ‘If you insist,’ he said, looking down at the picture again. He bowed his head down over the drawing and, this time, looked at the face pictured there. Brunetti couldn’t see his eyes, but he did watch his hand suddenly move away from his ear and move towards his neck again, this time with no attempt at flirtatiousness.

  A second later, he looked up at Brunetti, smiled sweetly, and said, ‘I’ve never seen him before, officer.’

  ‘Are you satisfied?’ the other one asked and took a step towards the door.

  Brunetti took the drawing that Crespo held out to him and slipped it back into the folder. ‘That’s only an artist’s guess of what he looked like, Signor Crespo. I’d like you to look at a photograph of him, if you don’t mind.’

  Brunetti smiled his most seductive smile, and Crespo’s hand flew, with a swallow-like flutter, back to the soft hollow between his collar bones. ‘Of course, officer. Anything you suggest. Anything.’

  Brunetti smiled and reached to the bottom of the thin pile of photos in the folder. He took one out and studied it for an instant. One would serve as well as the next. He looked at Crespo, who had again closed the distance between them. ‘There is a possibility that he was killed by a man who was paying for his services. That means men like him might be at risk from the same person.’ He offered the photo to Crespo.

  The young man took the photo, managing to touch Brunetti’s fingers with his own as he did so. He held it in the air between them, gave Brunetti a long smile, and then bowed his smiling face over the photo. His hand left his neck and slid up to cover his gasping mouth. ‘No, no,’ he said, eyes still on the photo. ‘No, no,’ he repeated and looked up at Brunetti with eyes gone wide with horror. He thrust the picture away from him, jammed it into Brunetti’s chest, and backed away from him, as though Brunetti had carried pollution into the room with him. ‘They can’t do that to me. That won’t happen to me,’ he said, backing away from Brunetti. His voice rose with every word, teetered on the edge of hysteria, and then fell over into it. ‘No, that won’t happen to me. Nothing will ever happen to me.’ His voice rose up into a high-pitched challenge to the world he lived in. ‘Not to me, not to me,’ he shouted, backing further and further away from Brunetti. He bumped into a table in the middle of the room, panicked at finding himself blocked in his attempt to get away from the photo and the man who had shown it to him, and lashed out at it with his arm. A vase identical to the one near Brunetti crashed to the floor.

  The door to the other room opened, and a fourth man came quickly into the room. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘What’s going on?’

  He looked towards Brunetti, and they recognized one another instantly. Giancarlo Santomauro was not only one of the best known lawyers in Venice, often serving as legal counsel to the Patriarch at no cost, but he was also the president and moving light of the Lega della Moralit à , a society of lay Christians dedicated to the ‘preservation and perpetuation of faith, home, and virtue’.

  Brunetti did no more than nod. If by any chance these men didn’t know the identity of Crespo’s client, it was better for the lawyer that it remain that way.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Santomauro demanded angrily. He turned to the older of the two men, now standing above Crespo, who had ended on a sofa, both hands over his face, sobbing. ‘Can’t you shut him up?’ Santomauro shouted. Brunetti watched as the older man bent over Crespo. He said something to him, then put both hands on his shoulders and shook him till his head wove back and forth. Crespo stopped crying, but his hands remained over his face.

  ‘What are you doing in this apartment, Commissario? I’m Signor Crespo’s legal representative, and I refuse to permit the police to continue to brutalize him.’

  Brunetti didn’t answer but continued to study the pair at the sofa. The older man moved to sit beside Crespo and put a protective arm around his shoulders, and Crespo gradually grew quiet.

  ‘I asked you a question, Commissario,’ Santomauro said.

  ‘I came to ask Signor Crespo if he could help us identify the victim of a crime. I showed him a photo of the man. You see his response. Rather strong way to respond to the death of a man he didn’t recognize, wouldn’t you say?’

  The man in the sweater looked at Brunetti but it was Santomauro who spoke. ‘If Signor Crespo has said he didn’t recognize him, then you have your answer and can leave.’

  ‘Of course,’ Brunetti said, tucking the folder under his right arm and taking a step towards the door. Glancing back at Santomauro, voice easy and conversational, Brunetti said, ‘You forgot to tie your shoes, Avvocato.’

  Santomauro looked down and saw immediately that they were both tied neatly. He gave Brunetti a look that would have etched glass but said nothing.

  Brunetti stopped in front of the sofa and looked down at Crespo. ‘My name is Brunetti,’ he said. ‘If you remember anything, you can call me at the Questura in Venice.’

  Santomauro started to speak but cut himself short. Brunetti let himself out of the apartment.

  * * * *

  Chapter Nine

  The rest of the day was no more productive, neither for Brunetti nor for the two other policemen working their way down the list. When they met back at the Questura late in the afternoon, Gallo reported that three of the men on his part of the list said they had no idea of who the man was. They were probably telling the truth, two others weren’t home, and another said he thought the man looked familiar but couldn’t remember why or how. Scarpa’s experience had been much the same; all of the men he spoke to were sure they had never seen the dead man.

  They agreed that they would try the same approach the next day, trying to finish up the names on the list. Brunetti asked Gallo to prepare a second list of the female whores who worked both out by the factories and on Via Cappuccina. Though he didn’t have much hope that these women would help, there was always the possibility that they had paid attention to the competition and would recognize the man.

  As Brunetti climbed the steps to his apartment, he fantasized about what would happen when he opened the door. Magically, elves would have come in during the day and air-conditioned the entire place; others would have installed one of those showers he had seen only in brochures from spas and on American soap operas: twenty different shower heads would direct needle-thin streams of scented water at his body, and when he finished with the shower, he would wrap himself in a thick towel of imperial size. And then there would be a bar, perhaps the sort set at the end of a swimming pool, and a white-jacketed barman would offer him a long, cool drink with a hibiscus floating on its surface. His immediate physical needs attended to, he passed to science fiction and conjured up two children both dutiful and obedient and a devoted wife who would tell him, the instant he opened the door, that the case had been solved and they were all free to leave for vac
ation the following morning.

  Reality, as is ever its wont, was discovered to be somewhat different. His family had retreated to the terrace which was filled with the first cool of early evening. Chiara looked up from her book, said ‘Ciao, Pap à ,’ tilted her chin to receive his kiss, and then dived back into the pages. Raffi looked up from that month’s issue of Gente Uomo, repeated Chiara’s greeting, and then himself dived back to a consideration of the compelling need for linen. Paola, seeing his state, got to her feet, put her arms around him, and kissed him on the lips.

  ‘Guido, go take a shower, and I’ll get you something to drink.’ A bell pealed out, somewhere to the left of them, Raffi flipped a page, and Brunetti reached up to loosen his tie.

  ‘Put a hibiscus in it,’ he said and turned to go take his shower.

  Twenty minutes later, he sat, dressed in loose cotton pants and a linen shirt, with his bare feet up on the railing of the terrace, and told Paola about the day. The children had disappeared, no doubt off in pursuit of some dutiful and obedient activity.

  ‘Santomauro?’ she asked. ‘Giancarlo Santomauro?’

  ‘The very one.’

  ‘How delicious,’ she said, voice rich with real delight. ‘I wish I’d never had to promise you I wouldn’t talk about what you tell me; this one is wonderful.’ And she repeated Santomauro’s name.

  ‘You don’t tell people, do you, Paola?’ he asked, though he knew he shouldn’t.

  She started to shoot back an angry answer, but then she leaned over and put her hand on his knee. ‘No, Guido. I’ve never repeated anything. And never will.’

  ‘I’m sorry I asked,’ he said, looking down and sipping at his Campari soda.

  ‘Do you know his wife?’ she asked, veering back to the original topic.

  ‘I think I was introduced to her once, at a concert somewhere, a couple of years ago. But I don’t think I’d remember her if I saw her again. What’s she like?’

  Paola sipped at her drink, then placed the glass on the top of the railing, something she was repeatedly forbidding the children to do. ‘Well,’ she began, considering how most acidly to answer the question. ‘If I were Signor, no, Avvocato Santomauro and I were given the choice between my tall, thin, impeccably well-dressed wife, she of the Margaret Thatcher coiffure, to make no mention of disposition, and a young boy, regardless of his height, hair or disposition, there is no doubt that my arms would reach out and embrace that boy.’

  ‘How do you know her?’ Brunetti asked, as ever ignoring the rhetoric and attending to the substance.

  ‘She’s a client of Biba’s,’ she said, naming a friend of hers who was a jeweller. ‘I’ve met her a few times in the shop, and then I met them at my parents’ place at one of those dinners you didn’t go to.’ Figuring that this was a way of getting back at him for having asked if she told people what he said to her, Brunetti let it pass.

  ‘What are they like together?’

  ‘She does all the talking, and he just stands around and glowers, as if there were nothing and no one within a radius of ten kilometres who could ever possibly measure up to his high standards. I always thought they were a pair of sanctimonious, self-important bigots. All I had to do was listen to her talk for five minutes, and I knew it: she’s like a minor character in a Dickens novel, one of the pious, malevolent ones. Because she did all the talking, I was never sure about him, had to go on instinct, but I’m very pleased to learn that I was right.’

  ‘Paola,’ he cautioned, ‘I have no reason to believe he was there for any other reason than to give Crespo legal advice.’

  ‘And he had to take his shoes off to do that?’ she asked with a snort of disbelief. ‘Guido, please come back to this century, all right? Avvocato Santomauro was there for one reason only, and it had nothing to do with his profession, not unless he has worked out a very interesting payment plan for Signor Crespo.’

  Paola, he had learned over the course of more than two decades, had the tendency to Go Too Far. He was uncertain, even after all this time, whether this was a vice or a virtue, but there was no doubt that it was an irremovable part of her character. She even got a certain wild look in her eye when she was planning to Go Too Far, which look he saw there now. He had no idea what form it would take, but he knew it was coming.

  ‘Do you think he’s arranged the same payment plan for the Patriarch?’

  In those same decades, he had also learned that the only way to deal with her tendency was to ignore her completely. ‘As I was saying,’ Brunetti continued, ‘the fact that he was in the apartment proves nothing.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, or I’d have to worry every time I saw him coming out of the Patriarchal Palace or the Basilica, wouldn’t I?’

  He did no more than glance in her direction.

  ‘All right, Guido, he was there on business, legal business.’ She allowed a few moments to pass and then added, in a completely different voice, so as to alert him that she was now going to behave and treat this seriously, ‘But you said that Crespo recognized the man in the picture.’

  ‘I think he did, the first time, but by the time he looked up at me, he’d had a second to recover, so his expression was perfectly natural.’

  ‘Then the man in the picture could be anyone, couldn’t he? Another whore, even a client? Have you thought about that, Guido, that he might be a client who likes to dress up as a woman when he, well, when he goes to see these other men?’

  In the sexual supermarket that was modern society, Brunetti knew, the man’s age made him far more likely to be a shopper than a seller. ‘That means we’d be looking for a man who used male prostitutes, rather than a man who was one,’ he said.

  Paola took her drink, swirled it around a few times, and finished it. ‘Well, that would surely be a longer list. And, considering what you’ve just told me about l’Avvocato del Patriarcato, a far more interesting one.’

  ‘Is this another one of your conspiracy theories, Paola, that the city is filled with seemingly happily married men who can’t wait to sneak off into the bushes with one of these transvestites?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Guido, what do you men talk about when you’re together? Soccer? Politics? Don’t you ever hunker down and gossip?’

  ‘About what? The boys on Via Cappuccina?’ He put his glass down with unnecessary force and scratched at his ankle, where one of the night’s first mosquitoes had just bit him.

  ‘I guess it’s because you don’t have gay friends,’ she said equably.

  ‘We have lots of gay friends,’ he said, conscious of the fact that it was only in an argument with Paola that he could be forced to make that statement as a claim to honour.

  ‘Of course we have, but you don’t talk to them, Guido, really talk to them.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do, swap recipes or divulge my beauty secrets?’

  She started to speak, stopped, gave him a long look, and then said, voice absolutely level, ‘I’m not sure if that remark is more offensive than stupid.’

  He scratched at his ankle, thought about what they had both just said. ‘I suppose it was more stupid, but it was pretty offensive, too.’ She gave him a suspicious glance. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added. She smiled.

  ‘All right, tell me what I ought to know about this,’ he asked, scratching again at his ankle.

  ‘What I was trying to tell you was that some of the gays I know say that a lot of the men here are perfectly willing to have sex with them: family men, married men, doctors, lawyers, priests. I imagine there’s a great deal of exaggeration in what they tell me, and not a little vanity, but I also imagine there’s a great deal of truth, as well.’ He thought she was finished, but she added, ‘As a policeman, you’ve probably heard something about this, but I’d suspect that most men wouldn’t want to hear it. Or, if they hear it, not want to believe it.’ She seemed not to be including him in this list, but, of course, there was no way of being sure about that.

  ‘Who is your chief source of information in
all of this?’ he asked.

  ‘Ettore and Basilio,’ she said, naming two of her colleagues at the university. ‘And some of Raffi’s friends have said the same thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Two of Raffi’s friends at theliceo. Don’t look so surprised, Guido. They’re both seventeen.’

  ‘They’re both seventeen andwhat?’

  ‘And gay, Guido. Gay.’

  ‘Are they close friends?’ he asked before he could prevent himself.

  Suddenly, Paola got to her feet. ‘I’m going to put the water on for the pasta. I think I might want to wait until after dinner to continue this discussion. That might give you some time to think about some of the things you’ve said and some of the assumptions you seem to be making.’ She picked up her glass, took his from his hand, and went back into the house, leaving him to think about his assumptions.