Unto Us a Son Is Given

by Donna Leon

  ‘Can’t Signorina Elettra get the number?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know if she used her own name or her husband’s, and it might take Signorina Elettra some time to get into the English phone system to look for it.’

  ‘I see.’ She extended a hand to Brunetti, who set his notebook on her desk, opened to the page with Dodson’s phone number.

  Griffoni picked up her phone and waved away Brunetti’s when he offered it to her. She put in the numbers and pushed her chair halfway into the doorway to cross her legs.

  Brunetti heard the double-buzz and then a male voice saying something he could not understand. ‘Good morning, sir,’ Griffoni said, speaking English with an accent mild enough not to interfere with understanding. ‘This is Commissario Claudia Griffoni. From the Venice police. My colleague Dottor Brunetti has given me your number.’

  She listened for a short time and said, ‘No, nothing, sir. It’s still early, and we’re trying to find information that will help us in our work.’

  Again, Brunetti heard the low sound of the man’s voice.

  ‘Only two things, sir: the number of your wife’s telefonino, and whether she brought anything of value with her.’ She paused as he answered and then said, ‘No, that’s all, sir.’

  This time the man spoke for a longer time. Griffoni leaned towards her desk and slid Brunetti’s notebook towards her. She wrote some numbers, set down the pen and looked off towards the windowless wall behind Brunetti’s head.

  As the man continued to speak, Griffoni closed her eyes and, occasionally, nodded. Finally she said, ‘No, sir, I’m not. It’s Commissario Brunetti who will be in charge.’ He spoke, this time for a shorter period, and then apparently stopped.

  ‘Yes, I’ll tell him, sir. And please accept my … sympathies for your loss.’

  There were some low sounds, and then he seemed to be gone. Griffoni whispered, ‘Goodbye,’ and set her phone on the desk.

  She opened her eyes and looked at Brunetti. ‘He gave me her number,’ she said, sliding his notebook back towards him. ‘And he said she had no jewellery. Not that she didn’t bring it: she never wore any except for the two rings.’

  Brunetti could ask this of a woman. ‘How did he sound?’

  ‘Like a dying man,’ was all Griffoni said. Brunetti asked for no explanation.

  23

  The autopsy was done the day after her death, and there were no surprises. Alberta Dodson had been strangled: Rizzardi found haemorrhaging in the strap muscles and on the tissues around the larynx. She had died of suffocation: Brunetti was relieved to read that it had probably been swift.

  Some sort of cloth – perhaps a scarf – had been used. Her killer, who had stood behind her, was no taller than she because the bruising on the sides of her throat sloped down towards the back. The scratches on her neck could have been caused by her own nails, but proof would be found only after the lab results were returned.

  The rest of the report catalogued good health and the likelihood that she would have lived many more years. Brunetti read such information with a haunting sense of loss, thinking of what the dead might have done with those years.

  The waiting began. There was no way to speed up a process that for years had remained unchanged in the face of all technological progress in the examination and assessment of evidence. They waited until the labs got to their samples and did what they had to do in order to find what they were told to look for. Were samples misplaced, did labels fall off and get put back on the wrong bottle? Who knew? Last month, a train had slipped off the rails because the place where two sections of track joined together had for months been supported by a piece of wood. A man was declared innocent of a crime but remained in prison for another three years because no one thought to inform him or his lawyer. So things went.

  The day after the autopsy, the manager of the hotel called Brunetti to tell him that their chief of security had downloaded all of the surveillance videos taken on the day of the murder and that he would send them by computer if he would only supply the correct address.

  Brunetti, embarrassed that he had not thought to ask about surveillance cameras, thanked the manager and asked if they had had time to look at the videos. The manager explained that there were hours of recordings from four different cameras, and they didn’t have the personnel to check them.

  Brunetti gave him the address and thanked him again, then immediately called down to Vianello, asking him to assign two reliable men to watch the films. He told the Inspector that Bocchese’s men could provide photos of Signora Dodson’s body so they’d have an idea of what she was wearing.

  ‘Tell the men looking at the videos that I’m interested in,’ Brunetti started, speaking as a friend, ‘anyone she spoke to except the man she checked …’ He paused and then, speaking as a policeman, continued, ‘anyone she spoke to.’

  ‘I’ll see who’s on duty,’ Vianello said. ‘Not Alvise or Riverre, I assume,’ he added neutrally.

  ‘No, better not,’ Brunetti answered, thanked him, and broke the connection.

  When Brunetti returned from having a coffee, he found a folder of documents on his desk. He opened it and, without bothering to look at the cover letter, glanced quickly through the first few pages, all of which, he discovered, were written in Spanish. The addresses at the top of each showed that he was looking at email correspondence between Gonzalo and Berta Dodson. He turned quickly back to the cover letter, from Signorina Elettra, which read, ‘The phone number was in her own name, and I found these between the two deceased persons you mentioned. Xavi is already translating them. I told him about the writers and what they might have been discussing, so he’s put brackets around some of the passages that might be relevant, with translation. The complete translation should be ready tomorrow.’ When he turned again to the documents, he saw the pencilled brackets, each followed by an Italian translation. He had ignored them when he’d first glanced at them. Perhaps the documents would allow him to recreate the story or at least give him some idea of what the story had been.

  He checked the date of the first mail and saw that, five weeks ago, Berta had written, ‘Precisamente porque soy tu mejor amiga puedo decirte la verdad.’ It was almost exactly like the Italian: ‘It’s precisely because I’m your best friend that I can tell you the truth.’

  The same day, Gonzalo shot back, ‘Tú no eres una amiga.’ So after all these years, she was no longer his friend.

  A few days later, Berta replied, ‘Somos los únicos que sabemos que no puedes hacer algo así.’ Here Brunetti was forced to turn to the Italian translation: ‘We alone know that you cannot do this.’ He wondered whom she had included in that ‘we’ and what it was that Gonzalo must not do. Was she advising him or forbidding him? He could stare at the phrase as much as he pleased: that made it no more understandable.

  Gonzalo replied the same day in Spanish so clear that Brunetti didn’t even bother to look at the translation of the first sentence: ‘Friends don’t give commands.’ Then Gonzalo got on his high horse and declared that ‘Un amigo nunca haría daño a un amigo’, which the translator told him meant, ‘A friend never does anything that will hurt a friend.’

  It took a week for Berta to respond to this: the email consisted of only one line, ‘Incluso si para pararte los pies he de destruir mi propia reputación.’ After it the no less threatening Italian: ‘Even if to stop you I must destroy my reputation.’

  The correspondence ended there. It was not difficult to see that they were discussing the adoption. Only something they both considered as important and irrevocable as this was likely to have so incensed them. But what might she have done that would destroy her reputation? Her reputation as what? The daughter of a man killed by Pinochet? The wife of an English nobleman? Unless the voice that had come through the phone line to Brunetti belonged to an imposter. And why her reputation and not her husband’s?

  Brunetti sat and chased his tail around his desk until someone knocked on the door and Signori
na Elettra came in.

  She had a folder in her hand. ‘Dare I say “Buenos días“?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Not if you pronounce it like that,’ she replied with an entirely friendly smile. Then, ignoring their exchange, she came over to his desk and set the papers in front of him. ‘These are the complete translations of the mails Xavi thought were related to their disagreement.’

  He took the papers and set them beside the others. ‘Did you have time to read them?’

  ‘No, Signore. I thought you might be in a hurry,’ she answered and left the room.

  The idea surprised Brunetti. In a hurry? For what purpose? To solve more quickly the puzzle of Alberta Dodson’s death and win a prize? To provide the press with its daily ration of fact and insinuation?

  It was the appearance of haste that was important in these matters: urgency was felt by very few. The discretion of the hotel had been absolute; her body had been removed before daylight. When the reporters and photographers of the two local newspapers arrived, there was nothing to photograph but the façade of the hotel, the same façade that appeared on the hotel’s website.

  Brunetti wrote a short statement and sent it to the press by email, saying only that the investigation of the murder of Signora Alberta Dodson had begun and the authorities were questioning anyone who had been in the hotel at the time of the crime. This included Rudy as well as leaving him unmentioned, and it resembled the truth so closely that Brunetti had no compunction about writing it.

  Both papers reported that the victim, Chilean by birth, was the wife of an English nobleman and was in the city as a tourist. They also lamented that the streets of Venice were no longer safe after a certain hour, ignoring the fact that Alberta Dodson had been killed inside the hotel.

  Not spurred by any sense of urgency, Brunetti returned to the Italian translation of her correspondence with Gonzalo. She had indeed claimed to be his best friend and to know the truth, though that truth was neither named nor described. Gonzalo had replied that it was not the voice of a friend he heard but a desire to hurt him.

  The ‘we’ who knew that he must not do whatever they were discussing remained equally unspecified in the translation. And her remark that he ‘must not do this’ retained its grammatical force in both languages but still remained as unclear after translation as before.

  Gonzalo’s response, that friends do not command, seemed entirely justifiable to Brunetti, as did the statement that this was a cause of pain to him: Brunetti had understood the Spanish well enough to know this.

  With diminishing concentration, he read through the translation again but still he found no hint as to why her reputation might be damaged. Surely no one would be foolish enough to suspect her of being Gonzalo’s lover. Gonzalo was one of the few men Brunetti knew who had never pretended not to be gay. Such openness was common today, but il Conte had told him that Gonzalo had made no secret of it even as a teenager in school, more than half a century ago. Thus he had been spared the years of pretending, of going through the fake marriage, raising – perhaps even siring – the children.

  Brunetti spent a long time reading through all of her other mails, all written in English, and then reading through them again. Signora Dodson revealed herself to be kind, generous, patient with her friends, and not judgemental, although occasionally she could not resist the lure of the British sense of irony in commenting on their behaviour.

  Relaxing into her native language with Gonzalo, she revealed the same qualities, at least when they were not discussing his plans to adopt. In this case, the flexibility and irony vanished, and she grew rigid in opposition to his idea, not in relation to any specific person but in general, viewing it as ‘dishonest’, and ‘liable to end in disillusion for the person you adopt’.

  Brunetti was tantalized by this but not at all certain about what she meant. The best he could come up with was some sort of financial scandal about which Berta knew, although with Gonzalo it would probably be a mess and not a scandal. Thus the adopted son’s hopes would be raised at the thought of becoming the heir to a wealthy man, only to inherit debts and ruin, and an apartment owned by the bank. But then he recalled what Padovani had said about what riches were to be found in Gonzalo’s home.

  Brunetti sat up straight in his chair and folded his hands on top of the print-outs of the emails. He stared across the room and out his window, where he saw a patch of pleasant sky and the arriving green of the vine that grew on the wall on the other side of the canal. He turned his thoughts to his professional ethics and the law, to the impropriety of ever using his position to solicit in any way the divulging of privileged information. The confessional-like confidentiality between a lawyer and his client continued after the death of the client, privacy to be preserved even beyond the grave.

  In a nod to his current state of cyber-capability, Brunetti refused the lure of the phone book in his drawer and, instead, turned to his computer to find the website of the studio legale of Costantini e Costantini, Gonzalo’s lawyers and, more importantly, a legal studio where the junior partner was Brunetti’s former classmate in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ca’ Foscari.

  He gave his rank and name to the woman who answered the phone and asked if he might have a word with Avvocato Giovanni Costantini. Her silence lasted three beats, and then she said she’d ask the Avvocato if he had time. Brunetti pushed his chair back and crossed his legs, then heard a click, and then the voice of Nanni Costantini. ‘Ah, Guido. I haven’t heard your voice in a long time.’

  Brunetti laughed and answered, ‘Say it clearly, Nanni: not since the last time I needed a favour.’

  ‘Yes, it could also be described that way,’ Nanni conceded in lawyerly fashion. ‘What is it you’d like to know? I can’t talk long. I’ve got a client sobbing in an office next door.’

  This would be a minor impediment to Nanni, Brunetti knew, and so asked, ‘Did a recently deceased client of your father’s manage to leave everything to a younger man?’

  ‘Ah,’ Nanni whispered, and Brunetti could almost hear the wheels beginning to turn in his head as he considered the various possibilities of disclosure and refusal. ‘First thing: he was my client: my father passed him on to me.’

  ‘Are you at liberty to tell me why?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Now that he’s dead, poor man, I believe I am. I suppose I’d tell you anyway, though. It’s very simple: my father had been his friend before he became his lawyer, and he didn’t want to ruin that by refusing to do what Gonzalo wanted, so I became his lawyer.’

  ‘I’ll repeat the question then,’ Brunetti said. ‘Did your client leave everything to that handsome man from Piemonte?’

  ‘Does that mean you haven’t seen him since Gonzalo died?’ Nanni asked, sounding amused.

  ‘I saw him only once,” Brunetti said. “At that dinner.’

  ‘Since Gonzalo’s death, he’s become very serious in his speech and demeanour with me,’ Nanni said, ‘as would be only right and proper for a person who has inherited such an estate.’ Then, in a more reflective voice, he added, ‘If he were an ancient Roman, he’d probably already have put a funeral mask in the atrium of the house.’

  Encouraged by Nanni’s willingness to pass on information about his client, Brunetti asked, ‘Did you try to persuade Gonzalo not to do it?’

  Nanni gave a weary sigh. ‘I gave up, Guido. To try to argue with him about this was to pass endless billable hours listening to his refusal to listen. I’ve always believed I should do something like that only when I’m planning a particularly expensive vacation and need the extra money.’ After allowing Brunetti to digest that, he added, ‘Besides, it’s not my job to try to reason with clients.’

  ‘You’ve grown no less high-minded since the last time I spoke to you, Nanni,’ Brunetti observed. ‘Did you ever suggest – merely suggest – that he might give some thought to his decision?’

  Nanni sighed melodramatically and went on, ‘About a month ago, he showed up here and told me wh
at he wanted to do; he asked me to turn it into legalese and write a will. He named Attilio Circetti di Torrebardo, his son, as his universal heir.’ Nanni paused to allow Brunetti to comment, but he said nothing, and the lawyer continued. ‘Two days later he came in to sign the will. Two of my secretaries witnessed his signatures, and he gave me a copy of the adoption decree and asked me to keep it with his other papers.’ After a moment he added, ‘I did not ask the name of the lawyer who obtained it for him.’

  Suddenly, Nanni broke off, and a voice could be heard at a distance from his end of the line. ‘Give me five minutes, and I’ll be there,’ he said sharply and returned his attention to Brunetti, saying, ‘And then, he fell down and died, and il Signor Marchese will inherit the lot.’

  ‘Which is?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘You know I’m not supposed to tell you this, don’t you?’ Nanni asked.

  ‘Of course I do, Nanni. Didn’t we learn our reverence for the law at the same university?’ Brunetti asked. ‘And I also know you weren’t supposed to tell me what you just did, either.’

  ‘All right. The apartment and everything inside it and a bank account somewhere that you didn’t hear me tell you about.’

  ‘Much in it?’

  ‘That’s none of my business,’ Nanni said curtly.

  ‘Sorry, Nanni,’ Brunetti said, meaning it, although he knew enough about bank accounts ‘somewhere’ to know that they were unlikely to be mentioned in the will but only in some private understanding between lawyer and client.

  ‘Anything else?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘A few hundred thousand Euros in stocks and bonds,’ Nanni said with the cavalier dismissal that only the wealthy can give to mention of such sums. ‘And a chunk of land somewhere in Chile that Gonzalo inherited from someone he said was the relative of a friend.’

  ‘Was it you who informed il Marchese of this?’

  ‘Yes. It was my responsibility.’