GB_23: By Its Cover: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery

by Donna Leon

  ‘They didn’t report it?’ Brunetti inquired.

  The Conte’s smile was indulgent, but he did not bother to answer.

  ‘At least I stopped the man who was doing it at the university,’ boasted a self-satisfied Paola.

  No one commented on this. None of them had wanted dessert, so they were drinking coffee while waiting to see what would appear in response to the Conte’s request for ‘una grappina’.

  To break the silence that still lingered after Paola’s remark, Brunetti turned to his mother-in-law and said, ‘Contessa Morosini-Albani’s a patron of the Merula, so she’ll have to be told about the thefts. How do you think she’ll react?’

  ‘Patron? Elisabetta?’ the Contessa repeated. ‘How remarkable.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Elisabetta can be so tight-fisted at times, you’d think she was born here,’ she said, and Brunetti marvelled that Paola’s father let his wife loose among his Venetian friends. In a more reflective, sadder, voice, his mother-in-law continued, ‘She’s mad to be accepted into society, so perhaps being a patron of something is one of the prices she’s willing to pay.’

  ‘If she’s been here, with you,’ Brunetti said, waving toward a Moroni portrait of one of the Conte’s ancestors, ‘then she’s accepted into society, isn’t she?’

  ‘Oh, she’s here because she’s one of my oldest friends,’ the Contessa said with a warm smile. ‘But most people won’t have her.’

  ‘But you do?’

  ‘Of course. She was very good to me when we were at school together. She’s two years older than I, and she protected me. And so I try to do the same now, where I can and when I can.’ She thought for a moment, placed her coffee cup to the side and said, ‘I never thought about it before, but it’s much the same situation. I was an outsider, and the older girls, the richer girls, bullied me terribly for that. Once Elisabetta – she was the daughter of a prince, after all, even if her family was ruined and the palazzo a shambles – became my friend, I was accepted.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound as if that’s happened here,’ Paola interrupted to say.

  ‘You know Elisabetta,’ the Contessa said. ‘She’s outspoken and judgmental and not an easy person. And she’s got those unfortunate stepchildren.’

  Paola nodded. Brunetti, thinking of Signorina Elettra’s response, asked, ‘Unfortunate for themselves or for her or for other people?’

  ‘For all of them, I’d say,’ the Conte answered.

  The Contessa couldn’t hide her surprise. ‘You know her stepchildren?’

  ‘I’ve done business with Gianni,’ he answered. ‘And I’ve met his two sisters. They tried to get some money back.’

  ‘From you?’

  ‘From an investment he made for them in one of my companies.’

  ‘What happened?’ interrupted Paola. ‘What company?’

  ‘Oh, it was a small thing, a wind farm in the Netherlands, and it wasn’t really very much money they were talking about.’

  ‘How much?’ Brunetti inquired, curious to know what sum ‘wasn’t much’.

  ‘Oh, half a million Euros, perhaps a bit more. I don’t remember now. It was about six years ago.’

  ‘What happened?’ Paola asked.

  ‘It was a well-run company, but Gianni decided to pull out too soon, and when he came to me, the stock had gone down about fifty per cent. He said he needed money. First he tried to borrow it from me, but I refused. Then he offered to sell me the stock.’ The Conte looked at his wife, but the arrival of the grappa saved him from having to continue with the story.

  He picked up his grappa and opened his mouth to pass judgement on it but was interrupted by the Contessa, who asked, ‘What was his offer?’

  Brunetti, who had lacked the courage to ask that question, was curious about the answer. The Conte toasted his wife with his tiny glass of grappa and took a sip. He set the glass down in front of him and tilted his head to one side, as if acknowledging that he had no choice but to answer his wife’s question.

  ‘He said he’d accept a lower price for the stock if I’d give him a receipt with an even lower price he could show his sisters, and he’d give me half the difference in cash. The stock was owned by all three of them in common, but he was the administrator, and they didn’t have any real understanding of business.’ Then, significantly, he added, ‘They trusted him. At the time.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Paola asked.

  ‘I refused. I told him he was free to sell the stock any way he chose but that I wasn’t interested.’ The Conte took another sip; irritation seeped into his voice as he said, ‘He was very insistent, and I had to be curt with him. He left.’ Then, after some time, ‘The sisters came to me a month later and demanded that I make good their loss.’ The Conte sighed. ‘Gianni had told them I’d cheated him – cheated them all.’

  ‘You never told me this, Orazio,’ the Contessa interrupted.

  ‘Elisabetta’s your friend, my dear. I didn’t want to trouble you.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’ she asked, visibly troubled by what he had just said.

  ‘I told them they would have to ask their lawyer to speak to mine, and he’d explain what had happened.’

  ‘Did you tell them what Gianni had tried to do to them?’

  ‘I don’t think that would have been correct, my dear. He’s their brother.’

  ‘Did they do it? Did their lawyer get in touch?’

  ‘Yes. Arturo explained the sale to them.’

  ‘Did the lawyer tell them what Gianni had tried to do?’

  ‘I never told Arturo about that,’ the Conte said and finished his grappa.

  ‘What will happen to Gianni?’ the Contessa asked.

  The Conte shrugged and rose from his chair. ‘I have no idea. I know only that he is not as clever as he thinks he is and that he is unable to resist his impulses – of any kind. So he will always fail at anything he does.’

  9

  They walked back to the apartment hand in hand, a desire brought on by the advent of spring or perhaps by Paola’s lingering admiration for Brunetti’s suit. ‘I’ve always considered her a friendly dragon,’ Brunetti said, believing Paola would understand.

  ‘Elisabetta?’ It was a request for confirmation, not a question.

  ‘Certainly not your mother.’

  After some thought, Paola said, ‘I can see that: she is, and she isn’t.’

  ‘The times I’ve seen her at your parents’, she hasn’t been breathing smoke and fire from her nostrils, but she’s never much seemed to care if people like her or not, and she certainly doesn’t hesitate to express her opinion.’

  ‘With us, she knows that she’s with people who like her.’

  ‘Am I included in that?’ Brunetti asked.

  Paola turned to look up at his face, surprised. ‘Of course you are. Goose. Because you’re one of us, she doesn’t pretend to be anything except what she is.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Intelligent, independent, impatient, lonely.’

  Brunetti, who had observed the first three qualities in the Contessa, had not considered the fourth. ‘What do you make of her giving that money to the library?’

  ‘I agree with my mother: it’s the price she thinks she has to pay in order to be accepted into society.’

  ‘You don’t sound as if you believe she’ll succeed.’

  ‘I know these people, Guido. For God’s sake, I’m one of these people. Remember that. She’s got pedigrees, both on her father’s side and her mother’s, that date to long before the titles of the noble families here. But she’s Sicilian, and she’s not a principessa – even if her father was a prince – so she’s never going to be let in. Not fully.’

  ‘Even though she married a Venetian?’ he asked.

  Paola surprised him by saying, ‘Perhaps that’s the reason why.’

  ‘You see how crazy all this is?’ Brunetti asked in a level voice.

  ‘I’ve seen how crazy it is since
I was six, but that’s not going to change it one whit.’ She stopped on the top of the bridge leading to San Polo and leaned on the parapet. ‘I wish she’d just forget about it, but I don’t think she’s capable of that. The wiring is too strong, or too old, and that’s the only world she knows, so it’s the world she has to be accepted into.’

  Brunetti asked, ‘Do you think she’d talk to me?’

  ‘Elisabetta?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I suspect she would. I told you, she thinks of you as one of us. And she likes you.’ Then, from habit, she added, just as he put his key in the front door, ‘I think.’

  *

  The next morning, Brunetti waited until ten-thirty to call the Contessa at the number Paola had given him. This gave him time to check both Il Gazzettino and La Nuova for any report of the theft at the library, but neither newspaper mentioned it.

  He dialled the Contessa’s telefonino number, and after only two rings a woman’s voice answered, ‘Morosini-Albani.’

  ‘Contessa,’ Brunetti began. ‘This is Guido Brunetti, Paola Falier’s husband.’

  ‘I recognize you by your own name, Commissario.’ It was a jest, not a provocation.

  ‘I’m complimented by that, Contessa,’ he said. ‘We so seldom speak during the dinners.’

  ‘I’ve always considered that a pity.’ Her voice bore only the most minimal trace elements of her Sicilian origins.

  ‘Then perhaps we might speak today, if you have time,’ he said, having decided it would be best to be straightforward with the Contessa.

  ‘About?’ she asked, and he was reminded of Dottoressa Fabbiani’s reluctance to tell him about the bequest.

  ‘The Biblioteca Merula,’ he said.

  A long pause followed. ‘Dottoressa Fabbiani told you about my involvement with the library?’ she finally said.

  ‘I’m afraid she had no choice, Contessa.’

  ‘People always have choices,’ she said instantly.

  ‘Perhaps fewer, when the police are involved,’ he answered mildly.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ she said, apparently displeased at the idea. ‘Is this an official request for information?’ she asked, immediately adding, ‘Not that I have any to give you.’

  ‘I want to talk to you about books, Contessa. I know little.’

  ‘But we’ve talked about books, Commissario.’

  She sounded so disingenuous that he laughed. ‘I mean rare books.’

  ‘The sort people would steal?’

  ‘Have stolen, in this case,’ Brunetti risked saying.

  ‘Does this mean you’re in charge of the investigation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you’d better come here and we can talk about it.’

  He knew where the palazzo was: he used to walk past it on his way to middle school, and he and Paola usually passed by if they chose to take the long way home after having dinner at Carampane. Its four floors loomed over a small campo in San Polo, the water door at the side providing access to one of the canals that ran perpendicular to Rio San Polo. The windows on the ground and first floors were protected by iron bars. During the decades he had seen them, Brunetti had always thought about fire and how the residents would have to leap from the second floor if one broke out. There were no graceful arabesques, no suggestion of filigree, no interest in beauty on these grilles: as straight as the lines on a crossword puzzle, the bars had been soldered together centuries before at the points where the verticals and horizontals intersected. Nothing except reaching hands had passed through those bars since then.

  The grilles had rusted over the centuries and scoured long dark trails down the façade. They reminded Brunetti of the signs of age on the front of Franchini’s building.

  He switched his briefcase to his left hand and rang the bell; after a short time a dark-skinned woman in a white apron opened the door for him. She might have been Thai or Filipina. ‘Signor Brunetti?’ she asked. When he said he was, she gave something that, in a former age, would have been called a curtsey. Brunetti forced himself not to smile. She stepped aside, said the Contessa was expecting him, and let him enter the vast open androne that extended all the way back to the canal, where he saw more of the barred windows.

  She closed the door, which appeared to cost her some effort, then turned and led him across the room and to a flight of steps that rose to the first floor. The door at the top was a vast slab of walnut squares, and into the centre of each was carved a rose in full blossom. The handle was brass, in the shape of a lion’s claw.

  Inside, she led him down a central, windowless corridor and into a large sitting room that looked out on the campo. Telling him to make himself comfortable, she said she would go and fetch the Contessa and disappeared through a set of double doors on the other side of the room.

  He had no idea how long he would have to wait, but he did not want to be found sitting when she came in. He went and studied the first painting on his left, a large hunting scene of a boar being pulled to earth by a pack of slavering hounds, two of whom appeared to have abandoned the hunt in order to roll on the ground together. An enormous Great Dane was savaging the boar’s ear, and another had him firmly by a back leg. Brunetti recognized the style from a still life the Conte had in his study and thought the painting might be a Snyders, but even the painter’s name could not make him like the painting.

  There were six portraits of men and women on the wall that received what little light came in from the campo. He detected a resemblance between one of the men and the boar; the expression on the face of another did not differ much from that of the dog dragging on the boar’s back leg. He wondered if they were family portraits.

  His observations were interrupted by the arrival of the Contessa. She wore a simple grey sweater and a darker woollen skirt that fell to slightly below her knees. Brunetti remembered that she had good legs, and a quick glance confirmed this. She wore strings of tiny linked gold circles, each smaller than the head of a pin, the delicate Manin link that had been the dream of his mother and her friends. They aspired to own one chain; the Contessa must have been wearing thirty.

  He knew she was two years older than his mother-in-law, but she looked at least a decade younger than that. Her skin was unblemished and seemed to be composed of cream and roses, though Brunetti gave himself a mental shake when he heard himself using those terms.

  She came quickly across the room to greet him, extended her hand and seemed not at all surprised when he bent to kiss it. She led him to a chair and asked, ‘May I offer you a coffee, Commissario?’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Contessa, but I had one on the way. You’ve already been very generous by agreeing to speak to me.’

  He waited until she had taken the chair opposite him before he sat. Perched upright, she looked so perfectly placed as to cause him to doubt that her back had ever touched that of a chair. Her profile, he had realized the first time he saw her, was perfect, with a straight nose and high forehead that spoke, in a way he did not understand, of optimism and energy. Her eyes, as close to black as eyes could be, were exaggerated by her pale skin.

  Brunetti placed his briefcase on the floor. ‘I’d like to thank you for finding the time to speak to me, Contessa,’ he said.

  ‘Books that once belonged to me have been damaged and stolen, and you’re going to try to find the person responsible. I hardly feel that I am being generous with my time if I speak to you.’ She smiled to soften the remark.

  Unsure if he had been reproved or thanked, he said, ‘I hope I don’t sound venal, but I’m here chiefly to speak about the financial loss to the library and, if you have enough time to spare, to learn more about books. Dottoressa Fabbiani said you know a great deal.’

  He caught the surprise that flashed across her face, and said, ‘She was very complimentary.’

  ‘I’m flattered,’ the Contessa replied, sounding as though she meant it.

  ‘She said you have a feel for books,’ he told her. She smiled
at this and raised a hand as if to push away the compliment, and Brunetti continued. ‘I know very little, really, about the world of books, well, books of this quality. That is, I understand the theft, but not why they chose to steal what they did or what happens after: where the pages can be sold, or their value.’

  ‘What a pity we never talked about this at Donatella’s dinners,’ she said.

  ‘I try to go there as Paola’s husband, not as a policeman.’

  ‘But you’re here as one today?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. Brunetti opened his briefcase and removed a notebook and pen. ‘One of the books that was stolen,’ he began, ‘was a gift from you to the library. Dottoressa Fabbiani said it was a Ramusio, but I have no idea of its value.’

  ‘What importance does that have?’ she asked.

  ‘It gives me an idea of the seriousness of the crime,’ Brunetti answered.

  ‘There’s no question of its seriousness,’ she said severely. ‘It’s a rare and beautiful book.’

  Brunetti shook his head to ward off confusion. ‘I’m afraid mine is a policeman’s vision, Contessa. The monetary value of the book affects the way we treat the crime.’

  He watched her consider this, certain that the idea offended her. She said, ‘The prices paid for them would be in the family records.’

  ‘But wouldn’t those prices be out of date?’ he asked, though he knew they must be. Then, thinking this would help calculate a more current price, he asked, ‘Was the Ramusio insured?’

  ‘My father-in-law,’ she began with a small smile, ‘once said that he had considered buying insurance for the things in the palazzo.’ She let that remark sit alone for three long beats and then added, ‘But he told me he found it cheaper to make sure that there was always at least one servant in the house.’ Her glance was as cool as it was level.

  ‘Yes, that would no doubt be cheaper,’ Brunetti agreed.

  ‘It was, then,’ she said. Having established the social position and wealth of her husband’s family, she added, more practically, ‘One way to discover their recent price would be to check the online lists of sales and auctions.’