by Donna Leon
‘I hope you really do like dogs, Signor Brunetti, because if you don’t, this is a very embarrassing situation,’ the lawyer said. Unable to resist the automatic response, she put a hand on the dog’s head and began to pull gently at her left ear.
‘She’s beautiful,’ Brunetti said.
‘Yes, she is,’ Avvocatessa Marieschi said. ‘And she’s just as sweet tempered as she is beautiful.’ Still busy with the dog’s ear, she said, looking at Brunetti, ‘But you didn’t come here to listen to me talk about my dog, I know. Could you tell me what I can help you with?’
‘Actually, I’m not sure your secretary understood me properly yesterday, Avvocatessa. I’m not a client, though there is something you can help me with.’
Smiling, her hand still busy with Poppi’s ear, she said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’
‘I’m a commissario of police, and I’m here to ask you some questions about one of your clients, Signora Maria Battestini.’
Poppi’s lips pulled back and, turning to look at Brunetti, she made a deep rumbling noise, but her owner’s voice drowned out the growl as she bent down over the dog’s head and said, ‘Did I pull your ear too hard, angel?’ Briskly, she moved the dog’s head aside with her hand and said, ‘All right, back down you go. I’ve got to work.’
With no resistance at all, the dog disappeared under the desk, moved around a bit, and then flopped down, presenting Brunetti with another view of her tail.
‘Maria Battestini,’ the lawyer said. ‘Terrible, terrible. I found that woman for her. I interviewed her and took her over and introduced her to Maria. Ever since I heard, I’ve felt responsible.’ Her lips disappeared as she pulled them tight from inside, a gesture Brunetti recognized as one that often preceded tears.
Hoping to avert that, he said, ‘You’re hardly responsible, Avvocatessa. The police let her into the country, and the Ufficio Stranieri gave her a permesso di soggiorno. It would seem to me that, if anyone is responsible, it is the officials, not you.’
‘But I’d known Maria so long, almost all my life.’
‘How is that, Dottoressa?’
‘My father was her lawyer, her and her husband’s lawyer, and so I knew her ever since I was a little girl, and then when I finished university and came to work for my father, she asked if I could be her lawyer. I think she was my first client, that is, the first one who was willing to trust me as a lawyer.’
‘And what did that entail, Dottoressa?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand,’ she said, but she was talking now and not getting ready to cry.
‘With what sort of things did she trust you?’
‘Oh, nothing really, not then. A cousin had left her husband an apartment on the Lido, and some years after his death, when she wanted to sell it, there was a dispute about ownership of the garden.’
‘Disputed ownership of property,’ he said, rolling his eyes towards heaven, as if he could think of no crueller fate. ‘Was that the only problem she had?’
She started to speak but stopped herself. ‘Before I answer any more questions, Commissario, could you tell me why you’re asking them?’
‘Of course,’ he agreed with an easy smile, recalling that she was a lawyer. ‘It would seem that the crime has been solved, and we want to close the case formally, but before we do that we would like to exclude any other possibility.’
‘What does that mean, “other possibility”?’
‘That there might have been someone else responsible for the crime.’
‘But I thought the Romanian woman . . .’ she began, and then sighed. ‘I honestly don’t know whether to be happy or sad at the idea,’ she finally admitted. ‘If she didn’t do it, then I can stop feeling so guilty about it.’ She tried to smile, failed, and went on, ‘But is there any reason why you, that is, the police, think that it might have been someone else?’
‘No,’ he said with the facility of the accomplished liar, ‘not really.’ Then, using Patta’s favourite argument, he added, ‘But in this climate of press suspicion of the police, we need to be as sure as we can be before we declare a case closed. The stronger the evidence, the less likely it is that the press will call our decisions into question.’
She nodded, understanding this. ‘Yes, I see. Of course I’d like to help, but I don’t really see any way I can.’
‘You said you helped her with other problems. Could you tell me what they were?’ When he saw her hesitation, he said, ‘I think her death and the circumstances surrounding it, Dottoressa, allow you to speak to me without worrying about your responsibility to your client.’
She accepted his argument. ‘There was her son, Paolo. He died five years ago, after a long illness. Maria was . . . she almost died from grief, I think, and she was incapable of doing anything for a long time afterwards. So I took care of the funeral for her and then of his estate, though that was all straightforward: everything went to her.’
Hearing her use the expression, ‘a long illness’, Brunetti realized how seldom he had ever heard anyone say that another person had died of cancer. It was always ‘a long illness’, ‘a tumour’, ‘a terrible disease’, or simply ‘that disease’.
‘How old was he when he died?’
‘Forty, I think.’
The fact that his estate passed to his mother presumably meant he was not married, so Brunetti asked only, ‘Did he live with her?’
‘Yes. He was devoted to her.’
Brunetti’s language receptors filed that one in with ‘a long illness’, and he made no comment.
‘Are you at liberty to reveal the contents of her will?’ he asked, changing the subject.
‘It was all completely standard,’ she said. ‘Her only living relative is a niece, Graziella Simionato: she inherited everything.’
‘Was it a large estate?’ he asked.
‘Not particularly. There was the house in Cannaregio, another one on the Lido, and some money Maria had invested at the Uni Credit.’
‘Have you any idea how much?’
‘I’m not sure of the exact amount, but it’s about ten million,’ she said, then immediately corrected herself, ‘old lire, that is. I still think in lire and have to translate.’
‘I suppose we all still do,’ Brunetti confessed, then added, ‘One final thing, about this matter of the television. Can you tell me anything about that?’
She smiled and shook her head. ‘I know, I know. I received a number of letters from people in the neighbourhood, complaining about the volume. Every time I’d get one, I’d go by and talk to Maria and she’d promise to keep the volume down, but she was old and she’d forget, or she’d fall asleep with it on.’ She raised her shoulders in a sigh of resignation. ‘I don’t think there was any solution, not really.’
‘Someone told us the Romanian woman kept the volume turned down,’ he said.
‘She also murdered her,’ the lawyer shot back with real anger.
Brunetti nodded in acknowledgement and acceptance of the reprimand. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘my remark was thoughtless.’ Then, ‘Could you give me the address of the niece?’
‘My secretary has it,’ Marieschi said in a voice that had suddenly grown cooler. ‘I’ll come with you and ask her to give it to you.’
That seemed to leave Brunetti no option but to leave, so he got to his feet and leaned towards the desk. ‘Thank you for your time, Dottoressa. I hope none of my questions has disturbed you.’
She tried to smile and said in a lighter voice, ‘If you had, Poppi would know it and wouldn’t be asleep like a baby down there.’ A sweep of the tail possibly belied the statement that Poppi was asleep, and Brunetti found himself distracted by the question of whether Chiara, if he told her about this scene, would ask if this were a sleeping-dog-lie.
He held the door open for the lawyer, waited while the secretary wrote down the address of Signora Battestini’s niece, thanked them both, shook hands with the lawyer, and left.
&nb
sp; 11
TO WALK BACK to the Questura along the Riva degli Schiavoni at this hour would have melted him, so he cut back into Castello in the direction of the Arsenale. As he passed in front of it, he wondered, as he usually did whenever he looked at the statues, whether the men who had carved them had ever seen a real lion. One of them bore a greater resemblance to Poppi than it did to any lion he had ever seen.
The water in the canal in front of the church of San Martino was exceptionally low, and Brunetti paused to glance down into it. The slopes of viscous mud on either side gleamed in the sunlight, and the stench of corruption rose towards him. Who knew the last time the canal had been dredged and cleaned?
When he got to his office, the first thing he did was to open the window to let some air into the room, but what came in seemed only to bring humidity and made no difference to the temperature. He left the window open in the hope that some passing zephyr would find it and slip through it. He hung up his jacket and took a look at the papers on his desk, though he knew Signorina Elettra would never leave anything on his desk save the most innocuous material that could be read by anyone. The rest would be kept in her desk or, more securely still, in her computer.
On the boat going down to Castello that morning, the Gazzettino had informed him that the judge in the airport case had ruled that the tapes from the hidden cameras in the baggage hall did indeed constitute an invasion of the privacy of the baggage handlers under accusation and thus the videos could not be produced as evidence against them. Reading the story, Brunetti had been swept by the absurd desire to go into the Questura, collect all of the witness statements that had been carefully accumulated during recent months and carry them off to the paper garbage drop at the Scuola Barbarigo. Or even more dramatically, he pictured a funeral pyre on the dock of the Questura, with blackened scraps of carbonized paper carried up into the air by those same reluctant zephyrs he had been wishing for.
He knew what would happen: the judge’s ruling would be appealed, and then the whole thing would start again and drag on and on, rulings and counter-rulings until the statute of limitations expired and the whole thing was sent to the archives. His career had been spent watching this same slow gavotte: so long as the music could be played slowly enough, with frequent pauses to change the members of the orchestra, then sooner or later people would get so tired of listening to the same old tune that, when time was called and it stopped, no one would notice.
It was reflections such as these, he realized, that made it sometimes difficult for him to listen to Paola’s criticism of the police. He knew that the justification for the judicial system under which he worked was that the endless appeal process guaranteed the safety of the accused from false conviction, but as years passed and those guarantees became broader and stronger and more encompassing, Brunetti began to wonder just whose safety the law was guaranteeing.
He shook himself free of these thoughts and went downstairs in search of Vianello. The inspector was at his desk, talking on the phone. When he saw Brunetti come in, he held up an outspread palm to indicate he would be at least five minutes and then raised his index finger in the general direction of Brunetti’s office to show he would come up when he was finished.
Upstairs Brunetti found his office somewhat cooler than when he had first arrived. To pass the time until Vianello came up, he pulled some papers from his in-tray and began to read through them.
It was fifteen, not five, minutes before Vianello came up. He sat and, without preamble, said, ‘She was a vicious old cow, and I couldn’t find anyone who cared in the slightest that she’s dead.’ He paused, as if hearing what he had just said, and added, ‘I wonder what’s on her headstone – “Beloved wife”? “Beloved mother”?’
‘I think the inscriptions are usually longer,’ Brunetti observed. ‘The carvers get paid by the letter.’ Then, more to the point, he asked, ‘Whom did you speak to and what else did you learn?’
‘We stopped in two of the bars and had a drink. Nadia said she used to live over there. She didn’t, but a cousin of hers did, and she used to visit her when they were kids, so she knew some names and could talk about a few of the stores that have gone out of business, so people believed her.
‘In fact, she didn’t even have to ask about the murder: people were eager to tell her. Biggest thing that’s happened over there since the floods in ’66.’ Reading Brunetti’s expression, he became less discursive. ‘There was general agreement that she was greedy, troublesome and stupid, but invariably someone would remind everyone that she was a widow whose only son had died, and people would pull themselves up short and say that she really wasn’t that bad. Though I suspect she was. We talked about her in the bars and then with the waitress at the restaurant, who lives around the corner from her, and there wasn’t one person who had a good word to say about her. In fact, enough time has passed for there even to be a little bit of sympathy for the Romanian woman: one woman said she was surprised it took so long for one of the women to kill her.’ Vianello considered this, then added, ‘It’s almost as if the residual sympathy she earned for the death of her son, well, a small part of it, has passed to Signora Ghiorghiu.’
‘And the son? What did they say about him?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No one had much of anything to say. He was quiet, lived with her, went to work, minded his own business, never caused anyone any trouble. It’s almost as if he didn’t have a real existence and was only a means to enable people to feel sorry for her. His dying, that is.’
‘And the husband?’
‘The usual stuff; “una brava persona”.’ But then Vianello warned, ‘That might just be amnesia talking.’
‘Did anyone say anything about the other women who worked for her in the past?’
‘No, not much. They came and cleaned or bought her food and cooked, but the Romanian was the first one who lived there with her.’ Vianello paused, then added, ‘My guess is that the others didn’t have papers and didn’t want to become known in the neighbourhood for fear that someone would report them.’
‘Did she have much contact with her neighbours? The old woman, that is,’ Brunetti asked.
‘Not for the last few years, especially since her son died. She could still get up and down the steps until about three years ago, when she had a fall and did something to her knee. After that, it looks like she didn’t go out again. And by then any friends she’d had in the neighbourhood were gone, either died or moved away, and she’d caused so much trouble that no one wanted anything to do with her.’
‘What sort of trouble?’
‘Leaving bars without paying, complaining that the fruit wasn’t good enough or fresh enough, buying something and using it and then trying to take it back to the store: all the things that make people refuse to serve you. I’m told there was a period when she threw her garbage out the window, but then someone called the police, and they went in and talked to her, and she stopped. But the main complaint was the television.’
‘Did anyone say they’d ever met her lawyer?’
Vianello thought about this for a moment, then shook his head and said, ‘No, no one ever met her, but a few people said that they’d written to her, especially about the television.’
‘And?’
‘No one ever received an answer.’
That didn’t surprise Brunetti: until a case was brought against the old woman, the lawyer would not be legally involved in the private behaviour of her client. But her refusal to respond to these complaints seemed at odds with Avvocatessa Marieschi’s assertions of regard and concern for Signora Battestini. Then again, a lawyer did not write a letter and then not charge for doing it.
‘And the day she was killed?’
‘Nothing. One man thinks he remembers seeing the Romanian come out of the house, but he wouldn’t swear to it.’
‘What was he uncertain about, that it was the Romanian or that she was coming out of that house?’
‘I don’t know. As soon as I showed an
y interest in what he was saying, he clammed up.’ Throwing up his hands, Vianello admitted, ‘I know it’s not a lot, but I don’t think there’s much else to be got by asking around.’
‘That’s nothing new, is it?’ Brunetti asked, making no attempt to disguise his disappointment.
Vianello shrugged. ‘You know what it’s like. No one seems to remember much about the son; they all disliked her, and since the husband’s been dead for a decade, all anyone can say is that he was una brava persona, how he liked to have a drink with his friends, and how they didn’t understand how he could stay married to a woman like that.’
Would people say the same things about him after he died? Brunetti wondered.
‘What about you?’ Vianello asked.
Brunetti told him about his conversation with the lawyer, not omitting mention of the dog.
‘Did you ask her about the bank accounts?’ Vianello asked.
‘No. She said that Signora Battestini had about five thousand Euros at the Uni Credit. I didn’t want to ask about the other accounts until we know something more about them.’
As if the thought were mother to the deed, Signorina Elettra chose that moment to appear in the doorway. She wore a green skirt and a white blouse, and at her neck she had a necklace of large cylindrical amber beads. As she came towards them, the sun fell on the necklace, turning the beads a flaming red and in the process bedecking her in the colours of the flag, as if she were a walking personification of civic virtue. Coming closer, she passed out of the sunlight and turned again into herself. She held out a folder and put it on his desk.
Pointing to it, she said with appealing self-effacement, ‘It turned out to be easier than I thought, sir.’
