by Donna Leon
Once again like Brunetti, Giulio had gone on to study criminal law, although he had chosen to use his knowledge the better to defend criminals, not to arrest them. Surprisingly, this in no way affected their friendship. Giulio’s acquaintances and friendships – to make no mention of his enormous and well-connected family – had provided Brunetti with a protective halo during the years he worked in Naples, a fact Brunetti had appreciated as much as he had tried to ignore it.
Some months before, Brunetti had returned to Naples to interview a witness and had met Giulio for dinner on the first night in the city. In the five years since they’d last seen one another, Giulio’s hair had turned entirely white, as had the moustache under his long pirate’s nose. Because his olive colouring had resisted the attempts of time to age it, the contrast with the white hair had succeeded only in making him look younger.
Rashly, Brunetti had begun by complimenting his friend on the suit he wore, charcoal grey with an almost invisible black stripe. From the inside pocket of his jacket, Giulio pulled out a notebook and a gold fountain pen, wrote a name and phone number, ripped out the paper and passed it to Brunetti. ‘Go see Gino. He’ll make you one in a day.’ Brunetti frowned. Giulio took another bite of fish: the owner had assured them it had been caught that morning. Suddenly Giulio set down his fork and took one of his phones from where they lay beside his plate; he typed in a short message, then looked up at Brunetti with an enormous, pleased smile and returned to the serious business of dinner.
They had talked, as they always did, about their families and, from long habit, did not discuss current events or politics. Their children matured, and their parents aged, sickened, and died; the world beyond their families did not exist as a subject of conversation. Giulio’s oldest boy had left Bocconi Business School and joined a rock band, and his daughter, who was eighteen, had an unsuitable boyfriend. ‘I try to be a good father,’ Giulio said. ‘I want them to be happy and have happy lives. But I see where they’re going, and there’s nothing I can do about it. All I want is to keep them safe.’
Brunetti recognized his own heart’s desire in what his friend said. ‘What’s wrong with her boy …’ Brunetti started to ask but was interrupted by the arrival of a short, bald man who came to their table and said good evening to Giulio. Giulio stood and shook his hand, thanked him for coming at such short notice, or at least that was what Brunetti thought he said, for the men spoke in Neapolitan that might as easily have been, for all Brunetti understood, Swahili.
After a few moments, the man turned and looked at Brunetti, who stood and shook his hand. The man ran his eye up and down his body, then moved around behind him. Brunetti, disconcerted, stood stock still, as he would at the first sign of a threat.
Speaking in Italian suffused with the perpetually inserted sh sound, g’s used in place of c’s, final syllables hacked off as if they were the heads of traitors, the other man told him not to worry, that he just wanted a look at his back. He rested a hand on the table and went down on one knee, and it was then that Brunetti realized that this man must be Gino, which surmise was confirmed when the man pinched the hem of the right leg of his trousers and gave it a sharp pull.
Nodding and muttering to himself, Gino stood, reached out to shake Brunetti’s hand, then Giulio’s, and said it would be ready by noon.
‘But I can’t,’ Brunetti said.
‘You can pay for it,’ Giulio said, smiling. ‘Be at peace with your conscience. Gino will do it for you at cost, and I promise you I won’t give him anything extra.’ He looked at Gino, who smiled, nodded, and held up both hands as if to block the very thought. Before Brunetti could speak, Giulio said, ‘You’ll dishonour me if you don’t accept.’ Gino put on the face of tragedy and Giulio asked, ‘All right?’
Giulio, although a lawyer, never lied; at least not to his friends. Brunetti nodded. He went to see Gino the following afternoon: hence the suit ‘Giulio had made for you’.
Paola turned away and opened a drawer to hunt for a scarf to put over her shoulders. She’d wear a coat on the street, but once they were inside, there was no certainty about what the heating system in an eight-hundred-year-old building would decide to do.
Brunetti removed his suit and hung it in the wardrobe, put on a clean shirt, then took the trousers of the suit – Gino’s suit – from the hanger and put them on. He chose a red tie: why not? Slipping his arms into the sleeves of the jacket, he was overcome with a sense of physical delight. He pulled it up by the lapels and rolled his shoulders until the fit was perfect. Only then did he look in the full-length mirror. It had cost him more than 800 Euros: God alone knew what Gino’s clients paid. Gino had provided no receipt, nor had Brunetti asked him for one. ‘I am at peace with my conscience,’ he told himself and smiled.
It took them only a short time to walk to the palazzo. No one they passed on the street seemed at all in a hurry: springtime was sinking in, forcing people to remember pleasure and ease and the end of the working day. At the top of the steps in the courtyard, a young man opened the door for them and took Paola’s coat, telling them the Count and Countess were in the small salon.
Paola led the way through what Brunetti knew would one day be hers. He allowed himself to wonder how many people it took to keep it running: how did you keep a place this size clean? He had never managed to count the rooms and would not permit himself to ask Paola. Twenty? More, surely there must be more. And to heat it? And what about the new tax on houses? His salary would probably not be sufficient to maintain it, and he’d find himself working to support a house, not his family.
His reflections were cut short by their entrance into the salon. Conte Orazio Falier stood by the window, looking across at Palazzo Malipiero Cappello; Contessa Donatella sat on the sofa, a glass of prosecco in her hand. Brunetti knew it was prosecco because the Conte had once delivered an attack on French wines, saying he wouldn’t have them in the house. Furthermore, his vineyards in Friuli produced one of the best proseccos in the region, which Brunetti had to confess was better than much of the champagne he’d tasted.
The Conte had suffered a slight heart attack some years before, and ever since that, he had greeted his son-in-law with two kisses instead of a formal handshake. His manner had softened in other ways: he was both more affectionate and more indulgent with his grandchildren, less ready to poke fun at what he called Brunetti’s ‘crusades’, and the uxorious warmth with which he had always treated the Contessa had grown more noticeable.
‘Ah, bambini miei,’ he surprised Brunetti by saying when he saw them. Did this mean that, after more than two decades, he was ready to accept Brunetti as his son? Or was it nothing more than an affectionate formula?
‘I hope you don’t mind if we have dinner alone,’ the Conte added, coming towards them, hands outstretched to place first on Paola’s shoulders and pull her close to kiss, and then on Brunetti’s. He led them over to his wife, whom they both bent to kiss.
Paola plunked herself down next to her mother, kicked off her shoes, and tucked her feet up under her. ‘If you’d told me we were going to be alone with you, I wouldn’t have worn this dress.’ Then, pointing towards Brunetti, ‘But I would still have made Guido wear that suit. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’
His father-in-law gave Brunetti an appreciative glance and asked, ‘Did you have it made here?’ What was it, Brunetti wondered, that told the Conte that the suit had been made for him and not bought in a shop? It was one of those secret Masonic powers men like the Conte had; that and the possession of perfect social pitch that let him speak to the postman or his lawyer with the same correctness, never offending by too much formality or too much familiarity. Perhaps eight centuries of good manners taught a man that.
‘You both look wonderful,’ the Contessa said in her accent-less Italian. She’d lived in Venice most of her life, yet not a whisper of its speech had penetrated her own. She pronounced every ‘l’, did not refer to her daughter as ‘la’ Paola: no cadence drove her sentences up
and down. ‘The suit’s perfect, Guido. I do hope your superior sees you wearing it some time.’
The Conte was beside them, carrying two flutes of prosecco. ‘It’s last year’s,’ he said as he handed them the glasses. ‘What do you think?’
Brunetti took a sip and thought it was delicious, but he left it to Paola, who knew the jargon, to pass judgement.
While she sipped and rolled it around on her tongue, Brunetti studied his parents-in-law. The Conte’s face was more lined, his hair whiter, but he still stood straight, though Brunetti realized he was no longer as tall as he once had been. The Contessa seemed the same as ever, her hair now a blonde that hinted at whiteness. She had had the sense, decades before, to declare the sun her enemy, and her face, as a result, was unlined and unblemished.
Paola interrupted his thoughts by saying, ‘It’s still young and a bit rough on the back of the tongue, but next year it will be perfect.’ She looked at Brunetti and said, ‘So next year we have to visit more often.’ Saying that, she leaned aside and patted her mother on the thigh, then started to tell her about Chiara’s latest scholastic triumph.
The Conte drifted back to the front window, and Brunetti, who could never see enough of the view, joined him. Looking down at the water two floors below, the Conte said, ‘I used to swim there when I was a boy.’ He sipped at his wine.
‘So did I. But not here. Down in Castello,’ Brunetti said. Then, after imagining the water, ‘It’s a terrible thought, isn’t it? Doing it now, I mean?’
‘Many things have become terrible here,’ the Conte said, tilting his glass in the direction of one of the palazzi on the other side of the Grand Canal. ‘The third floor of Palazzo Benelli is a bed and breakfast. The heir’s Brazilian companion runs it and that gives him enough to keep him in cocaine.’ He leaned forward and pointed up the Canal on their side. ‘Two doors down from here, the owner had his friends appoint him an inspector for the Fine Arts Commission and is now available for consultations about permits for restorations.’
‘“Consultations”?’
‘That’s what they’re called. An English acquaintance wanted to gut the piano nobile of a palazzo near the Rialto, but to do it he had to take down a wall that had frescoes from the sixteenth century. He had his consultation, and then he had his permits.’
‘How is that possible?’ Brunetti asked out of real curiosity, having no intention to pursue it professionally.
‘The frescoes had been hidden by a fake wall, probably for centuries, and weren’t discovered until his workers started removing that wall, so they were never registered. The workmen were all from Moldavia and didn’t much care what they did. So he had his consultation, and the wall came down.’
‘He’s Venetian, isn’t he?’ Brunetti asked unnecessarily. He knew whom the Count was talking about and had heard other stories about building permits and how to be sure to get them, but something perverse in him needed confirmation.
‘They’re all Venetian,’ the Conte said, speaking the word as though it were ‘paedophile’ or ‘necrophiliac’. ‘The men who decide that the cruise ships can continue to shake the city to pieces and pollute it as though it were Beijing, and the men who insist that MOSE is going to work and let’s see how much more we can get out of it, and the people who run the only casinò on the planet that loses money.’
Brunetti had been hearing the same things – and saying them – for years, and now he said the same thing he often asked himself: ‘What are you going to do about it?’
The Conte looked at him with real affection. ‘I’m so glad we finally talk to one another, Guido.’ He sipped, then set his glass down on a table. ‘The only thing I can do is what I’ve been doing for the last five years.’
‘Which is?’
‘Move my money out of the country. Invest in countries that have a future, invest in countries where there is the rule of law.’ He stopped, all but inviting Brunetti to ask.
‘Which ones are those?’
‘The Northern ones. Even the United States. Australia.’
‘Not China?’
The Conte made a face and said, ‘The rule of law, Guido. I don’t want to go from the frying pan into the fire. I don’t want to go from a country where the law is hopeless and the political system corrupt to one where there is no law, and the political system is even more corrupt.’
Brunetti ran his mind around the globe, seeking some other place where the rule of law prevailed and where – his father-in-law’s concern – money would be safe. Searching for safety on that green, blue, and beige ball suspended in space, Brunetti realized that people tended to be physically safe in the countries where money was also safe. Or had the Conte’s capitalism infected him during these past years, and he’d got it backwards and it was actually that money was safe in places where people were safe?
It was delicate, proceeding here. Could he ask Conte Orazio what money it was? Could he ask if he were investing in companies there or relocating his own to other countries? The Guardia di Finanza dealt with this sort of thing, checking for irregularities; in the tangled skein of Italian law, there was always a way to find irregularities of one sort or another. ‘Make the laws for your friends, impose them on your enemies.’ How many times in his life had people explained that rule of survival to him?
‘I hope your plans are successful,’ was all he could think of to say.
‘Thank you,’ the Conte said, with a smile and a nod that acknowledged Brunetti’s right to avoid engagement with this subject. ‘And you? What are you doing?’
It was not necessary for Brunetti to ask the Conte not to repeat what he was told. His father-in-law had not achieved his position in the country by being a blabbermouth. ‘We were called about a robbery at the Biblioteca Merula. Someone who was using the library for research sliced pages from books. Others are missing.’
‘How did he get in?’ the Conte asked. ‘Didn’t they check him or check his application?’ Then, after a pause replete with feigned patience, he added, ‘If they make people fill out applications, that is.’
‘He filled one out. But he had a fake passport and a fake letter of recommendation from an American university.’
‘No one noticed they were fake?’
Brunetti shrugged. ‘They believed him to be a member of the community of scholars.’
This was greeted by a wild hoot of derision from Paola, who had apparently diverted her attention from her mother long enough to eavesdrop on their conversation. ‘“Community of scholars”,’ she repeated. ‘It would make the chickens laugh.’
Mildly, her mother said, ‘We sent you to all those famous schools, dear, and now you speak badly about your colleagues. Couldn’t you be a little bit kinder?’
Paola leaned to the side and put her arm around her mother’s shoulders. She kissed her cheek, then kissed it again. ‘Mamma, you are the only person on the planet who would consider the riff-raff I’m at university with to be scholars.’
‘You went there and you’re one, please don’t forget,’ her mother said, still mildly.
‘Mamma, please,’ Paola begged. But before she could say more, the young man who had greeted them on their arrival appeared in the doorway and said that dinner was ready.
Brunetti extended his hand to the Contessa, who placed hers on it, as light as a feather, and got effortlessly to her feet. Paola stood up, far less gracefully, put on her shoes, and took her father’s arm.
Brunetti accompanied the Contessa to the small dining room. ‘It always troubles me to hear Paola speak so badly of her colleagues,’ her mother said as they entered the room.
‘I’ve met a few of them,’ Brunetti limited himself to saying.
She gave him a quick look and smiled. ‘She is a rash woman.’
‘Your daughter?’ Brunetti said in feigned shock.
‘Oh, Guido, I think you provide encouragement sometimes.’
‘She needs none, I suspect,’ was all Brunetti said.
They sat at a
round table, Brunetti facing Paola, with the Contessa on his left, the Conte on his right. A young woman appeared and placed an enormous ceramic platter in the middle of the table, covered with a seafood antipasto sufficient to sate the appetites of the people at the table, in the kitchen, and probably in the adjoining palazzi as well.
The conversation was the normal talk of families: children, relatives, mutual friends, ailments – there was more of that with each passing year – and then on to the condition of the world, which they all agreed was dire.
Later, when the maid was removing the plates that had held gnocchi di patate con ragù, Paola asked, ‘Did you tell Papà about the library?’
The Conte answered, ‘Yes, he did. It’s starting here now, as well.’ He shrugged and took a drink of mineral water. None of them found it necessary to mention the Girolamini Library in Naples, one of the most illustrious in the country, which had been subject to the depredations of its own director, now in prison. Because the catalogue of holdings, such as existed, was believed to have been altered, there was no way to know what was missing: estimates ranged from 2,000 to 4,000 volumes, some of which had surfaced in Munich, Tokyo, in the shops of respectable book dealers and in the libraries of politicians who, of course, expressed astonishment at the presence of those volumes. In MY library? Heavily laden cars were reported to have been seen driving out of the library’s courtyard in the night, groaning under their weight of paper. How many volumes were missing? Who knew? Manuscripts, incunabula, gone, gone, gone.
‘Friends of mine have had things stolen from their libraries,’ the Conte interrupted his own reverie by saying.
‘May I ask … ?’ Brunetti said and immediately regretted having spoken.
The Conte looked at him and smiled. ‘I think they’d be happier if you didn’t know their names, Guido.’
Of course, of course: no one wanted the authorities to know what was in their homes. What happened if and when the government slapped a tax on private possessions? If they could reimpose a tax on your house, or houses, what was to stop them from putting a tax on what was in them?
