Unto Us a Son Is Given

by Donna Leon

  ‘And how did he take the news?’

  ‘He was, of course, grief-stricken,’ Nanni said with an intonation that suggested he had not finished, as, indeed, proved to be the case. ‘But grief-stricken in the manner of people in bad films or amateur theatrics, who think it’s shown by pouring ashes on your head or tearing at your cheeks. Or wailing.’ He paused, and then added, ‘As I said, a Roman.’

  ‘I see,’ Brunetti said. And did. ‘Was anyone else mentioned in the will?’

  ‘His maggiordomo, or butler, or whatever you want to call him. Bangladeshi, Jerome, though don’t ask me how he got a name like that. And his housekeeper, Maria Grazia. They’ve both been with him for as long as I can remember. Jérôme sobbed when I told him what Gonzalo left him; she couldn’t even talk, she was so moved.’ Brunetti noticed that, with these people, Nanni behaved like a lawyer and revealed nothing about their bequests.

  ‘How was it you spoke to them?’ Brunetti asked, knowing that the will could not have been probated so quickly.

  ‘Gonzalo had always spoken so warmly of them, I thought I should go and see them.’ A chill passed through Nanni’s voice when he went on, ‘Some people have called me or met me on the street and asked about Gonzalo. Mostly they wanted to know who would get the apartment and the rest of the loot, but they’re ashamed to ask outright. It made me feel sorry for Gonzalo, though I never had before: he always seemed to be having so much fun.’

  Brunetti listened, recalling funerals he had attended where the conversation centred on speculation about the will and who would get what, although this was, of course, done in a very elegant way.

  The thought sobered him, and he said, ‘How sad: you live your life among people you think are friends, giving them parties, taking them to lunch, having big dinners at your home, never forgetting a birthday. And in the end, all they care about is who inherits your stuff.’

  ‘I have to get back,’ Nanni said abruptly. ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘No. And thanks, Nanni.’

  ‘Does it help, what I told you?’

  ‘Not really, I’m afraid,’ Brunetti admitted. Then he added, ‘If anything, it’s merely confirmed my worst suspicions.’

  ‘All part of a lawyer’s job,’ Nanni said and broke the connection.

  24

  Two days after the murder, Rudy was given permission to return to London. After three days, Rizzardi released Alberta Dodson’s body, and it was returned to Yorkshire, a cousin of her husband, Roderick Dodson, having sent his plane to bring it back. One of the two officers assigned to view the hours of surveillance films from the hotel came down with flu, joined by his colleague the day after. No one could be found to replace them, so Vianello and Pucetti volunteered to spend a few hours a day looking at the videos. On the first day, they both noticed the advanced ages of the persons who were at the hotel that evening; by the second day, Pucetti said he felt like a custodian in a retirement home rather than a policeman. On the third day, Pucetti called across the room to Vianello and told him to come and look.

  When Pucetti moved the video back a few minutes, they both saw a grey-haired woman walk into the bar of the hotel and look around. After having watched so many white-haired people during the last days, neither of them was sure until Pucetti stopped the video for long enough for them both to consult the photos of her taken in death. The camera gave a long shot down the length of the bar to the woman standing at the far end; she wore a calf-length black dress like the one the dead woman had worn. As if someone had spoken to her, she turned her head to the left, towards one of the three booths.

  Her face relaxed and she walked to the booth. She slipped into it, still facing the camera, said something to the person opposite her, then shifted farther into the booth and more than half disappeared.

  Occasionally, people came into the bar and walked through the range of the video camera. Four large men entered, then two more. The first were tall and robust and might have been the sons of the other two, who were markedly stooped and bald. The six men scrummed at the bar, their backs to the booth where Signora Dodson was sitting. The two largest put their arms around one another’s shoulders and became a broad-backed, two-headed creature as they drank something out of short glasses. They remained in place; two hands appeared from the left and set two more glasses on the bar, then two more, and then two more. As they drank, one of the men almost lost his footing, as if pushed from the side; later, all six of them walked away, passing both the booth and the camera.

  After the wall of men had disappeared, two couples entered. The two men slipped into the booth where the woman had been sitting, and the two women sat opposite them.

  ‘The men blocked them when they left,’ Vianello said.

  Pucetti checked the screen and wrote down the time displayed: 23:17, then pushed Play and continued looking at the screen in the hope that Signora Dodson would return. Vianello went back to his desk and resumed looking at the video of the front entrance of the hotel.

  Two hours later, just as he was getting to the point where he thought he’d begin to scream at the sight of so many walkers, wigs, and false teeth, Vianello had a split-second’s sight of a woman with grey hair approaching the bottom of the staircase to the upper floors, only to be instantly blocked from sight by three men who were descending. By the time they were out of the picture, she was gone. The Inspector stopped the video and rewound it to watch again, but once again she was blocked by the bodies of the men, and he could not be certain it was Alberta Dodson. The time at the bottom of the tape was 23:19.

  Knowing that Rudy had called the desk around midnight, he continued until that point, hoping to see her again or to see another person with her. When the clock at the bottom of the last tape said 00:11, Vianello clicked stop, explained his uncertainty about what he’d seen, or not seen, in the previous tape, and suggested the younger man take the two videos up to Commissario Brunetti.

  Brunetti, spared hours of watching the elderly guests, was stunned by the sight of the living woman. He recognized her instantly, the smile, the cap of short grey hair. Seeing her moving her hand towards her heart, as if to identify that she was the woman the person in the booth was waiting for, completely unnerved him, and he had to look away from the screen.

  ‘Did you know her well, sir?’ Pucetti asked.

  ‘I met her the day she died,’ was all the explanation Brunetti would permit himself to give.

  Brunetti looked back at the screen and saw her slip into the booth and be reduced by half, then disappear fully, when substituted by the two-headed man.

  After Pucetti changed videos, Brunetti watched a woman who might have been Alberta Dodson for an instant before she was blocked from sight by the three men coming down the stairs. He watched her again, and again, and even though he wanted to say it was she, he could not. ‘That’s all there is, sir,’ Pucetti said when Brunetti looked up from the screen.

  Brunetti looked at the time on the bottom of the screen. ‘Eleven nineteen,’ he read aloud. ‘Not even half an hour later, she was dead.’ Then, to Pucetti, ‘Have you spoken to the waiter or the bartender?’

  ‘No, sir. We saw these just now, and I brought them up immediately.’

  ‘I want to talk to them,’ Brunetti said. There had been more than forty guests at dinner, as well as the normal number of hotel guests, but it was possible the men at the bar would remember the woman. But perhaps not: Paola had once told him that women, after a certain age – especially if their hair was white – were virtually invisible. Well, he’d see.

  Had there been a god of discretion, the concierge could have modelled for the statue. Neither short nor tall, neither thin nor stout, he had a straight nose set correctly between grey-green eyes and a smile that implied humour without displaying it. He spoke Italian with a slight accent that suggested he had no native language, only a wide range of lightly accented languages. His professionalism was displayed by the fact that he recognized Brunetti immediately as a police official a
nd moved away from his place behind the reception desk to greet him and walk him a few steps away from where clients were standing.

  ‘How may I help you, Signore?’ he asked Brunetti, leaving the rank unnamed but recognized.

  The crossed keys on his lapel gleamed, and Brunetti could easily picture him wiping them down each night with a moist suede cloth. ‘My name is Brunetti. Commissario. I’ve come about Signora Dodson.’

  It was the business of the concierge, Brunetti knew, to be a party to the needs of his guests, and so he lowered his head and muttered, ‘Terrible, terrible,’ before looking up at Brunetti and saying, ‘Your men were very prompt in finishing their work in the room, sir.’

  ‘I hope they,’ Brunetti began, intending to say ‘left no traces’, but, given the circumstances, that sounded ominous to him, so he finished by saying, ‘were careful.’

  ‘Indeed, sir. There was no sign they had been there. Very professional.’ The man’s mouth moved in something that resembled a smile.

  ‘I’d like to speak to the waiter and bartender who were on duty that night,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘Of course, sir. If you’d wait for a moment, I’ll check the staffing rosters and give you their names.’ He returned behind the counter and called up some information on his computer, allowed a few moments to pass and reached under the counter to pull a sheet of paper from the printer.

  When he came back to Brunetti, he said, ‘The waiter is on duty now, for another hour, and the bartender will be here at six. He’ll be on duty until two.’ Seeing Brunetti’s surprise, he explained, ‘It takes him some time to clean up the bar, and the night manager doesn’t clear the till before one-thirty.’

  ‘Long night,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘Even longer for Sandro: he lives in Quarto d’Altino.’ It surprised Brunetti to hear the man sound sympathetic about his colleague’s commute and realized it would surprise him to hear the concierge be sympathetic about anything.

  ‘I’ll take you to the waiter,’ the concierge said, resisting the temptation to give the deferential half-bow he no doubt gave to all guests. He moved off towards the part of the hotel that faced the Grand Canal. It was a long, narrow room with wooden tables bearing up under enormous bouquets. Hotels like this seemed to have a special fondness for gladioli: Brunetti disliked them, thought them overdressed and too tall.

  A white-jacketed waiter about Brunetti’s age stood at the bar, waiting for the bartender to set two tall drinks on a small tray. As soon as he set them down, the waiter turned and took them to a young couple sitting at a small table with a view of what must be the most beautiful City Hall in Europe. So intent were they on one another that they didn’t notice the waiter’s arrival and had to lean back from where they sat with hands joined across the table to make enough room for him to set down the drinks.

  When he turned away, the waiter was smiling and didn’t bother to remove the smile as he approached the bar. ‘We all were like that once,’ he said to the concierge as he reached him. ‘Thank God happiness is contagious,’ he concluded and looked at Brunetti, who smiled at the idea.

  ‘Gino,’ the concierge began, ‘this is Commissario Brunetti. He’d like to ask you a few questions.’ That said, he bowed to Brunetti and nodded to the waiter and headed back towards the front desk.

  He’d seen the waiter before, probably passed him on the street for years. He was tall, his remaining hair cut short in a half-tonsure around the back of his head. He had the alert eyes common to waiters, always checking whether someone might want his attention. ‘Do you mind if we stay here, sir?’ he asked and turned to cast his eyes across the few tables that were occupied.

  ‘Not at all,’ Brunetti said. ‘You were on duty the night the woman was killed here, is that right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I was, Commissario,’ he said. ‘She sat in one of the booths.’

  ‘It’s a strange choice for a woman alone,’ Brunetti said. ‘They often sit at a table, don’t they?’

  ‘That’s right, sir. But she wasn’t alone.’

  ‘Ah,’ Brunetti said. ‘I didn’t know that. Was her companion a man or a woman?’

  ‘A man, sir,’ the waiter answered and turned to glance at the tables where people were sitting. When no one signalled to him, he returned his attention to Brunetti. ‘It was a man. Quite a bit younger than she was, I’d say.’ He listened to himself say that, shrugged, and added, ‘That night, there weren’t many young people in the place, so maybe he looked young because everyone else looked seventy.’

  ‘Could you describe him?’

  The waiter smiled again. ‘I can describe his left cheek, sir. He was looking at the menu, had his head turned down, propped on his left hand, menu flat on the table.’ Then, at the sight of Brunetti’s disappointment, he added, ‘He had brown hair.’

  ‘Do you remember anything else?’

  ‘Not really, sir. It was pretty obvious he didn’t want to be noticed, so I didn’t bother to look at him when I took the drinks to the table.’

  ‘Did you have an impression of how well they knew one another?’

  ‘No, sir. I didn’t hear them talk to one another, and it was the lady who ordered the drinks. I remember that.’

  ‘But did they behave in a friendly manner?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘I can’t say, not really, sir. The place was full that night because of the dinner. I was on the run all night, especially after dinner.’ His eyes played over the tables again, but still no one raised a hand or tried to catch his attention.

  ‘I understand,’ Brunetti said. He decided not to mention having seen the videos: perhaps the staff didn’t know they were being filmed. If so, it was better to leave it that way. ‘Did they leave together, do you know?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve no idea, Commissario. There was a table of Englishmen over by the window. They’re terrible drinkers, the English. I must have gone to their table six times that night. Maybe more.’ Then, remembering Brunetti’s question, he said, ‘When I came back to the booth, they were gone and new people were sitting there; two young couples.’

  ‘How did those people pay, the man and the woman?’ Brunetti asked, hoping it had been a credit card, and the man had paid.

  ‘They left the money on the table. And a tip. The young people pushed it towards me when I came to take their order.’

  ‘Did you see either of them again?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Now came the time for Brunetti to ask the question the waiter might not want to answer. But he was curious and so he began, ‘When you learned that this woman had been killed …’ He paused and saw the waiter sweep his eyes across the people in the room, his expression now like that of a lost child on the beach, searching for someone to help him find his mother.

  Brunetti continued. ‘Why didn’t you contact us?’

  A few seconds passed. The waiter lowered his head and studied the tips of his shoes. He looked up and asked, ‘There’s no law that says I have to, is there?’

  ‘There’s no law that says you’re obliged to do so, no.’

  ‘No one goes to the police,’ the waiter said resignedly, with no evident desire to offend Brunetti. ‘It’s only trouble.’

  ‘You really believe that?’

  ‘Sí, Signore,’ the waiter answered. Then, seeing a hand raise to summon him, and making no attempt to disguise his relief, he asked, ‘Is that all, Signore?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Thank you for what you’ve told me.’

  The waiter nodded and was gone. Brunetti decided to go home.

  Later that evening, after dinner, he walked back to the hotel to speak to the bartender, a quick-gestured man who apparently had been informed that the police wanted to question him. He smiled at Brunetti and offered him a drink. Even though Brunetti refused, the bartender asked how he could help.

  Yes, he had been on duty the night of the birthday dinner, but he had paid no attention to the people in the booths, only prepared their drinks. When Brunett
i questioned him about this, the bartender told him that all he had to do was turn around and look towards the booths to see what he meant. When Brunetti did, he saw that the booths ran in a diagonal away from the bar in order to create a space in which people could stand. Thus the bartender could see into only the first booth. ‘If you’d like to see from here, sir …’ Brunetti smiled and shook his head to show that wasn’t necessary.

  Brunetti could see from where he stood that it would be impossible to see into the booths, so thanked the man and left. Both of them gone by 23:17. Two minutes later she – perhaps she – started up the stairs of the hotel and went to her death.

  On the way home, he stopped in a bar and had a grappa that burned his throat as it went down. He didn’t care.

  25

  The following morning, as soon as he got to the Questura, Brunetti banished all thought of discretion or correct police procedure and gave in to curiosity. Without bothering to consider the reason for or the possible consequences of his behaviour, he called Nanni Costantini’s office, again identified himself, and asked if he might have a minute of the Avvocato’s time. This time the secretary transferred the call without asking Brunetti to wait.

  Nanni provided the telefonino number of il Marchese di Torrebardo – careful to call him that – and said that he was very curious to know why Brunetti wanted to speak with him.

  ‘All in good time, Nanni,’ Brunetti replied. ‘I don’t think I know myself.’

  His friend laughed and ended the call.

  Using his office phone and not his telefonino, Brunetti called the number Nanni had given him and waited while it rang eight times. A man’s voice answered, saying, ‘Torrebardo.’

  ‘Ah,’ Brunetti said. ‘This is Commissario Guido Brunetti. I’m calling from the Questura.’ When the expected response failed to come, Brunetti went on, ‘I’ve been assigned the investigation into the death of Alberta Dodson,’ still not addressing the man by name or title.

  The continued lack of response had a special resonance for Brunetti. ‘I’m trying to contact anyone who might have known her,’ he said with calm amiability, as though his statements were no more than part of an ongoing friendly dialogue.