A Noble Radiance

by Donna Leon

  'Who do you think it was that told me to get it?' Elettra asked.

  'Why?'

  1 suppose because she spends so much time in the hospitals, so she knows what goes on there’ She considered this a moment and added, 'Though, from what she's told me, if s probably more a case of what doesn't go on. Last week, one of her patients was in a room at the Civile with six other women. Nobody bothered to give them any food for two days, and they could never get anyone to explain why’

  'What happened?'

  'Luckily, four of them had relatives who came to visit, so they divided their food among the others. If they hadn't, they wouldn't have eaten’

  Elettra's voice had risen as she spoke; as she continued, it rose even higher. 'If you want someone to change your sheets, you've got to pay to have them do it. Or to bring a bed pan. Barbara's given up on it, so she's told me to go to a private clinic if I ever have to go to the hospital.'

  'And I didn't know you had a car,' he said, always surprised to learn that someone living and working in the city had one. He'd never owned one, nor had his wife, though both of them could drive, badly.

  1 keep it at my cousin's in Mestre. He uses it during the week, and I get to use it on the weekends if I want to go anywhere.'

  'And the apartment?' asked Brunetti, who had never bothered to insure his own.

  ‘I went to school with a woman who had an apartment in Campo della Guerra. Remember when they had that fire there? Her apartment was one of the ones that got burned out.'

  1 thought the comune paid for the restoration,' Brunetti said.

  'They paid for basic restoration’ she corrected him. 'That didn't include trifles like her clothing or possessions or new furniture.'

  'Would insurance be any better?' Brunetti asked, having heard countless horror stories about the difficulty of getting money out of an insurance company, regardless of how legitimate the claim.

  'I'd rather try with a private company than with the city’

  'Who wouldn't?' Brunetti asked in tired resignation.

  'But what can I do for you, Commissario?' she asked, waving away their conversation and, with it, the thought of loss and pain.

  'I'd like you to go down to the archives and see if you can get me the file on the Lorenzoni kidnapping’ Brunetti said, returning both loss and pain to the room.

  'Roberto?'

  'Did you know him?'

  'No, but my boyfriend at the time had a younger brother who went to school with him. The Vivaldi, I think. It was ages ago’

  'Did he ever say anything about him?'

  'I don't remember exactly, but I think he didn't like him very much.'

  'Do you remember why?'

  She tilted her chin up at an angle and pulled her lips into a tight moue that would have subtracted greatly from the beauty of any other woman. In Elettra's case, all it did was show him the fine line of her jaw and emphasize the redness of her pursed lips.

  'No,' she finally said. 'Whatever it was, it’s gone’

  Brunetti didn't know how to ask the next question. 'You said your boyfriend of the time. Are you still, er, are you still in contact with him?'

  Her smile blossomed, as much at his question as at the awkwardness of his phrasing.

  'I'm the godmother of his first son,' she said. 'So it would be very easy to call and ask him to ask his brother what he can remember. I'll do it this evening’ She pushed herself back from her chair. ‘I’ll go down and see about the file. Shall I bring it up to your office?' He was grateful she didn't ask why he wanted to see it. Superstitiously, Brunetti hoped that, by not talking about it, he could prevent its turning out to be Roberto.

  ‘Yes, please,' he said and went back up there to wait

  4

  A father himself, Brunetti chose to delay calling the Lorenzoni family until the autopsy was completed. From what Doctor Bortot had said and from the presence of the ring, it seemed unlikely that anything he might discover during it would exclude the possibility of its being Roberto Lorenzoni, but as long as that possibility existed, Brunetti wanted to spare the family what might be unnecessary pain.

  While he waited for the original file on the crime, he tried to recall what he knew about it. Since the kidnapping had taken place in the province of Treviso, the police of that city had handled the original investigation, even though the victim was Venetian. Brunetti had been busy with another case at the time, but he remembered the diffused sense of frustration that had filled the Questura after the investigation had spread to Venice and the police tried to find the men who had kidnapped the boy.

  Of all crimes, Brunetti had always found kidnapping the most horrible, not only because he had two children, but because of the dirt it did on humanity, placing an entirely arbitrary price on a life and then destroying that life when the price was not met. Or worse, as in so many cases, taking the person, accepting the money, and then never releasing the hostage. He had been present when the body of a twenty-seven-year-old woman had been retrieved; she had been kidnapped and then placed in a living tomb under a metre of earth and left there to suffocate. He still remembered her hands, grown as black as the earth above her, clutched helplessly to her face in death.

  He could not be said to know anyone in the Lorenzoni family, though he and Paola had once been at a formal dinner party where Count Ludovico had also been present. As is always the case in Venice, he occasionally saw the older man on the street, but they had never spoken. The commissario who had handled the Venetian part of the investigation had been transferred to Milan a year ago, so Brunetti could not ask him face to face about the way things had been handled or about his impression of events. Often that sort of personal, unrecorded response proved useful, especially when a case came to be reconsidered. Brunetti accepted the possibility, since the body found in the field might prove not to be that of the Lorenzoni boy, that the case would not be reopened and the body would prove to be a matter for the Belluno police. But then how explain the ring?

  Signorina Elettra was at his door before he could answer his own question. ‘Please come in’ he called. 'You found it very quickly.' Such had not always been the case with the Questura files, not until her blessed arrival. 'How long have you been with us now, Signorina?' he asked.

  'It will be three years this summer, Commissario. Why do you ask?'

  It was on his lips to say, 'So that I might better count my joys,' but that sounded to him too much like one of her own rhetorical flights. Instead, he answered, 'So I can order flowers to celebrate the day’

  She laughed at this and they both remembered his original shock when he learned that one of her first actions upon taking the position as Vice-Questore Patta's secretary had been to order a bi-weekly delivery of flowers, often quite spectacular flowers, and never fewer than a dozen. Patta, who was concerned only that his expense allotment from the city extend to his frequent lunches - usually quite as spectacular as the flowers - never thought to question the expense, and so her antechamber had become a source of pleasure to the entire Questura. It was impossible to tell if the staff's delight resulted from what Signorina Elettra decided to wear that day, the flowers in the small room, or from the fact that the government was paying for them. Brunetti, who took equal delight in all three, found a line, he thought from Petrarch, running through his memory, where the poet blessed the month, the day, and the hour when he first saw his Laura. Saying nothing about any of this, he took the file and placed it on the desk in front of him.

  He opened the file when she left and began to read. Brunetti had remembered only that it happened in the autumn; September 28th, sometime before midnight on a Tuesday. Roberto's girlfriend had stopped her car (there followed the year, make, and licence number) in front of the gates of the Lorenzbni family villa, rolled down the window, and punched the numerical code into the digital lock that controlled them. When the gates failed to open, Roberto got out of the car and walked over to see what was wrong. A large stone lay just inside the gates, and its w
eight prevented them from opening.

  Roberto, the girl said in the original police report, bent to try to move the rock, and when he was stooped down, two men emerged from the bushes beside him. One put a pistol to the boy's head, while the other came and stood just outside her window, pointing his pistol at her. Both wore ski masks.

  She said that, at first, she thought it was a robbery, and so she put her hands in her lap and tried to remove the emerald ring she was wearing, hoping to drop it to the floor of the car, safe from the thieves. The car radio was playing, so she couldn't hear what the men said, but she told the police she realized it wasn't a robbery when she saw Roberto turn and walk into the bushes in front of the first man.

  The second man remained where he was, outside her window, pointing his gun at her but making no attempt to speak to her for another few moments, and then he backed into the bushes and disappeared.

  The first thing she did was to lock the door of the car. She reached between the seats of the car for her telefonino, but its batteries had run down, and it was useless. She waited to see if Roberto would come back. When he didn't - she didn't know how long she waited - she backed away from the gate, turned, and drove towards Treviso until she came to a phone booth at the side of the highway. She dialled 113 and reported what had happened. Even then, she said, it didn't occur to her that it could be a kidnapping; she had even thought it might be a joke of some sort.

  Brunetti read through the rest of the report, looking to see if the officer who spoke to her had asked why she would think such a thing could be a joke, but the question didn't appear. Brunetti opened a drawer and looked for a piece of paper; finding none, he leaned down and pulled an envelope from his wastepaper basket, turned it over and made a note on the back, then went back to the report.

  The police contacted the family, knowing no more than that the boy had been taken away at gunpoint. Count Ludovico arrived at the villa at four that morning, driven there by his nephew, Maurizio. The police were, by then, treating it as a probable kidnapping, so the mechanism to block all the family funds had been put into motion. This could be done only with those funds in the country, and the family still had access to their holdings in foreign banks. Knowing this, the commissario from the Treviso police who was heading the investigation attempted to impress upon Count Ludovico the futility of giving in to ransom demands. Only by blocking any attempt to give the kidnappers what they demanded could they be dissuaded from future crimes. Most times, he told the Count, the person was never returned, often never found.

  Count Ludovico insisted that there was no reason to believe that this was a kidnapping. It could be a robbery, a prank, a case of mistaken identity. Brunetti was well familiar with the need to deny the horrible and had often dealt with people who could not be made to believe that a member of their family was endangered or, often, dead. So the Count's insistence that it was not, could not be, a kidnapping was entirely understandable. But Brunetti wondered, again, at the suggestion that it could be some sort of prank. What sort of young man was Roberto that the people who knew him best would assume this?

  That it was not was proven two days later, when the first note arrived. Sent express from the central post office in Venice, probably dropped into one of the slots outside the building, it demanded seven billion lire, though it did not say how the payment was to be arranged.

  By then the story was splashed all over the front pages of the national newspapers, so there could have been no doubt on the kidnappers' part that the police were involved. The second note, sent from Mestre a day later, dropped the ransom to five billion and said that the information about how and when to pay it would be phoned to a friend of the family, though no one was named. It was upon receipt of this note that Count Ludovico made his televised appeal to the kidnappers to release his son. The text of the message was attached to the report. He explained that there was no way he could raise the money, all of his assets having been frozen. He did say that, if the kidnappers would still contact the person they intended calling and tell him what to do, he would gladly exchange places with his son: he would obey any command they gave. Brunetti made a note on the envelope, telling himself to see if he could get a tape of the Count's appearance.

  Appended was a list of the names and addresses of everyone questioned in connection with the case, the reason the police had questioned them, and their relationship to the Lorenzonis. Separate pages held transcripts or summaries of these conversations.

  Brunetti let his eye run down the list. He recognized the names of at least a half dozen known criminals, but he was unable to see any common thread connecting them. One was a burglar, another a car thief, and a third, Brunetti knew, having put him there, was in prison for bank robbery. Perhaps these were some of the people the Treviso police used as informers. All led nowhere.

  Some other names he recognized, not because of their criminality, but because of their social position. There was the parish priest of the Lorenzoni family, the director of the bank where most of their funds were held, and the names of the family lawyer and notary.

  Doggedly, he read through every word in the file; he studied the block printing on the plastic-covered ransom notes and the lab report that accompanied them, saying that there were no fingerprints and that the paper was too widely sold to be traceable; he examined the photos of the opened gate to the villa taken both from a distance and close up. This last included a photo of the rock that had blocked the gate. Brunetti saw that it was so large that it could not have fitted through the bars of the gate: whoever had put it there would have to have done so from inside. Brunetti made another note.

  The last papers contained in the file had to do with the finances of the Lorenzonis and included a list of their holdings in Italy, as well as others they were known to possess in foreign countries. The Italian companies were more or less familiar to Brunetti, as they were to every Italian. To say 'steel' or 'cotton' was pretty much to pronounce the family name. The foreign holdings were more diverse: the Lorenzonis owned a Turkish trucking company, beet processing plants in Poland, a chain of luxury beach hotels in the Crimea, and a cement factory in the Ukraine. Like so many businesses in Western Europe, the interests of the Lorenzoni family were expanding beyond the confines of the continent, many of them following the path of victorious capitalism towards the East.

  It took him more than an hour to read through the file, and when he finished, he took it down to Signorina Elettra's office. 'Could you make me a copy of everything here?' he asked as he placed it on her desk.

  'The photos, too?'

  'Yes, if you can.'

  'Has he been found, the Lorenzoni boy?'

  'Someone has,' Brunetti answered but then, conscious of this minor evasion, added, ‘It's probably him.'

  She pulled in her lips and raised her eyebrows, then shook her head and said, 'Poor boy. Poor parents.' Neither of them said anything for a moment, and then she asked, ‘Did you see him when he appeared on television, the Count?'

  'No, I didn't.' He couldn't remember why, but he knew he hadn't seen it.

  'He was wearing full make-up, the way the newscasters do. I know about that sort of thing. I remember thinking at the time that it was a strange thing for a man to be made to do especially in those circumstances.'

  'How did he seem to you?' Brunetti asked.

  She thought about this for a moment .and then answered, 'He seemed without hope, absolutely certain that, whatever he begged or pleaded, it wasn't going to be given to him.'

  'Despair?' Brunetti asked.

  ‘You'd think that, wouldn't you?' She looked away from him and paused again. Finally she answered, 'No, not despair. A sort of tired resignation, as if he knew what was going to happen and knew he couldn't do anything to stop it.' She looked back at Brunetti and gave a combination smile and shrug. I'm sorry I can't explain it better than that. Perhaps if you looked at it yourself, you'd see what I mean.'

  'How could I get a copy?' he asked.

 
1 suppose RAI must have it in their files. I'll call someone I know in Rome and see if I can get a copy.'

  'Someone you know?' Brunetti sometimes wondered if there were a man in Italy between the ages of twenty-one and fifty that Signorina Elettra didn't know.

  'Well, really someone Barbara knows, an old boyfriend of hers. He works in the news department in RAI. They graduated together’

  'Then he's a doctor?'

  'Well, he has a degree in medicine, though I don't think he's ever practised. His father works for RAI, so he was offered a job as soon as he got out of university. Because they can say he's a doctor, they use him to answer medical questions that come up -you know the sort of thing they do: when they have a programme about dieting or sunburn and they want to be sure that what they tell people is true, they set Cesare to doing the research. Sometimes he even gets interviewed, Dottor Cesare Bellini, and he tells people what the latest medical wisdom is.'

  'How many years did he spend in medical school?'

  'Seven, I think, just like Barbara.'

  'To be interviewed about sunburn?'

  Again the smile appeared, just as quickly to be shrugged away. "There are too many doctors already; he was lucky to get the job. And he likes living in Rome.'

  'Well, then, call him if you would.'

  'Certainly, Dottore, and I’ll bring you the copies of the report as soon as I make them.'

  He saw thatthere was still something she wanted to say. 'Yes?'

  'If you are going to reopen the investigation, would you like me to make a copy for the Vice-Questore?'

  'If s a bit early to say we're going to reopen the investigation, so a single copy for me would suffice,' Brunetti said in his most oblique voice.

  'Yes, Dottore,' came Signorina Elettra's non-committal answer, 'and I'll see that the originals get back into the file’

  'Good. Thank you’

  'Then I’ll call Cesare’

  'Thank you, Signorina,' Brunetti said and went back up to his office, thinking of a country that had too many doctors but where it grew more difficult year by year to find a carpenter or a shoemaker.