A Noble Radiance

by Donna Leon

  When Brunetti began to ask about Roberto's health in the months before his disappearance. Doctor De Cal excused himself for a moment and went to get the boy's file. He had come in about two weeks before his disappearance. Doctor De Cal said, complaining about lethargy and continuing stomach pain. The doctor had first thought it was colic, to which Roberto was prone, especially in the first weeks of cool weather. But when he didn't respond to treatment, De Cal had suggested he see an internist.

  'Did he see that doctor?' Brunetti asked.

  ‘I don't know.'

  'Why not?'

  ‘I went on holiday, to Thailand, soon after I gave him Dottor Montini's name, and when I got back, he had been kidnapped.'

  'Did you ever have cause to speak to this Doctor Montini about him?'

  'About Roberto?'

  'Yes.'

  'No, never. He's not someone I know socially: he's a professional colleague.'

  'I see,' Brunetti answered. 'Could you give me his number?'

  De Cal set the phone down, and came back with the number. It's in Padova,' he explained and gave Brunetti the number.

  Brunetti thanked him and asked, 'You thought it might be colic, Dottore?'

  Brunetti heard the rustle of a page. 'Well, it could have been’ Again, the sound of turning pages came down the line. 'I have it recorded here that he came to see me three times in a period of two weeks. That was in September, the tenth, the nineteenth and the twenty-third.'

  The last appointment, then, would have been five days before he was kidnapped.

  'How did he seem?' Brunetti asked.

  ‘I have a note here that he seemed irritated and nervous, but I really don't have a clear memory of it’

  'What sort of a boy did he seem to you. Doctor?' Brunetti asked suddenly.

  De Cal answered after a moment. ‘I suppose he was pretty typical’

  'Of what?' Brunetti asked.

  'Of that sort of family, that social circle’

  He remembered now that his classmate. Franco, had been a committed Communist. That sort of thing very often ran in families, so he asked the doctor, 'You mean of the wealthy and idle?'

  De Cal had the grace to laugh at Brunetti's tone. ‘Yes, I suppose I do. Poor boy, there was no bad in him. I knew him since he was about ten, so there was little I didn't know about him.'

  'Such as?'

  'Well, he wasn't very bright. I think it was a disappointment to his father, that Roberto should be so slow.'

  Brunetti sensed that there was an unsaid half to that sentence, and so he suggested a way to end it

  TJnlike his cousin?' 'Maurizio? 'Yes.'

  'Have you met him?' De Cal asked. 'Once.'

  'And what did you think?'

  ‘You couldn't say he isn't bright'

  De Cal laughed and Brunetti smiled at the answer.

  'Is he your patient as well, Doctor.'

  'No, only Roberto. I'm really a paediatrician, you know, but Roberto kept coming to me when he got older, and I never had the heart to suggest he start seeing another doctor.'

  'Not until Doctor Montini’ Brunetti reminded him.

  'Yes. Whatever it was, it wasn't colic. I thought it might be Crohn's Disease - I've even made a note of it in the file here. That's why I sent him to Montini. He's one of the best men around here for Crohn's.'

  Brunetti had heard of the disease but could remember nothing. 'What are the symptoms?' he asked.

  'Intestinal pain to begin with. Then diarrhoea, blood in the stool. It's very painful. Very serious. He had all of those symptoms.'

  'And did you ever have your diagnosis confirmed?'

  'I told you, Commissario. I sent him to Montini, but when I got back from vacation, he had been kidnapped, so I didn't pursue it. You could ask Montini.'

  1 will, Dottore,' Brunetti said and bade the doctor a polite farewell.

  He immediately called the Padova number-. Doctor Montini was making his rounds at the hospital and wouldn't be back in his office until the following morning at nine. Brunetti left his name, office and home numbers, and asked that the doctor call him as soon as he could. There was no special need for haste, but Brunetti felt a dull impatience with not knowing what he was looking for or what was important, and he thought that haste would at least disguise that ignorance.

  His phone rang as soon as he set it down. It was Signorina Elettra, saying that she'd prepared a file on the Lorenzoni businesses, both in Italy and abroad, and wondered if he would like to see it. He went downstairs to get it.

  The file was as thick as a package of cigarettes. 'Signorina,' he began, 'how did you manage to accumulate something like this in so little time?'

  ‘I spoke to some friends who are still working at the bank and asked if they could ask around.'

  'You did all this since I asked you?'

  'If s easy, sir. It all comes to me through that.' As had by now become ritual, she waved in the direction of her computer, the screen of which glimmered behind her.

  'How long would it take a person to learn to use one of them, Signorina?'

  'You, sir?' she asked.

  'Yes.'

  Tt would depend on two things, no, three.' 'And what are they?'

  'How intelligent you are. How much you want to learn. And who teaches you.' Modesty prevented his asking her assessment of the first, uncertainty kept him from answering the second. 'Could you teach me?' 'Yes.'

  'Would you?'

  'Certainly. When would you like to begin?'

  'Tomorrow?'

  She nodded, then smiled.

  'How much time will it take?' Brunetti asked.

  'That depends, as well.'

  'On what?'

  Did her smile grow even wider? 'On the same three things’

  He started to read while still on the steps, and by the time he was again at his desk, he had read through lists of holdings that totalled billions of lire, and he had begun to understand why the kidnappers would have chosen the Lorenzonis. Little order had been imposed upon the papers in the file, but Brunetti made an attempt at that by separating them into piles, placing the papers in rough correspondence to their location on the map of Europe.

  Trucks, steel, plastics factories in the Crimea: he followed a trail of perpetual expansion to meet new markets, a veritable explosion towards the East, as more and more of the Lorenzoni interests and holdings slipped behind the place where the Iron Curtain no longer stood. In March, two clothing factories in Vercelli had been closed, only to reopen two months later in Kiev. A half hour later, he set the last paper down on his desk and saw that most of them lay to his right, even though he was vague about the exact location of many of the places to which the Lorenzoni interests were expanding.

  It did not take Brunetti long to remember the stories that had recently filled the press about the so-called Russian Mafia, the bands of Chechens, who, if these accounts were to be believed, had taken over most business in Russia, both legitimate and illegitimate. It was a short leap from there to the possibility that these men could somehow have been responsible for the kidnapping. After all, the men who took Roberto had not spoken at all, had merely shown him their guns and led him away.

  But then how would they have ended up in that field below Col di Cugnan, a place so small that even most Venetians had probably never heard of it? He pulled out the file on the kidnapping and paged through it until he found the plastic-covered ransom notes. Though the block letters could have been printed by anyone, there were no errors in the Italian, though Brunetti admitted to himself that that proved nothing.

  He had no idea of what Russian crime would feel like, but all his instincts told him that this wasn't one. Whoever had kidnapped Roberto would have had to know about the villa, been able to wait there undetected until he turned up. Unless, of course, Brunetti added to himself, they already knew when Roberto would appear. This, in fact, was yet another one of those questions that had not been asked during the original investigation. Who had known of Roberto's pl
ans for the evening and of his intention to go to the villa?

  As often happened, Brunetti was struck by restlessness as he read the reports prepared by other people, in this instance people no longer involved in the case.

  Feeling not a little uncomfortable at the ease with which he succumbed to his feelings, he picked up the phone and dialled the internal number for Vianello. When the sergeant answered, Brunetti said, 'Lef s go look at the gate’

  17

  Although Brunetti was as urban a man as could be imagined, never having lived anywhere but in a city, he took a peasant's delight in the abundance of nature and in any sign of its beauty. Since childhood he had loved the springtime most, felt for it a passion that was tangled up with memories of the joy that came with the first warm days after the endless cold of winter. And there was, too, delight at the return of colour: the bold yellow of forsytrria, the purple of crocuses, and the happy green of new leaves. Even from the rear window of the car that sped north on the autostrada, he could see these colours, and he gloried in them. Vianello, riding in the passenger seat beside Pucetti, discussed with him the strangely mild winter, far too warm to have frozen and thus destroyed the seaweed in the laguna, which in its turn meant that the beaches would be tilled with it this summer.

  They turned off at Treviso, then doubled back on the state highway in the direction of Roncade. After a few kilometres, they saw a sign on the right, directing them towards the church of Sant Ubaldo.

  'It’s down here, isn't it?' Pucetti asked, having checked the map before they set off from Piazzale Roma.

  ‘Yes,' Vianello answered, 'supposed to be on the left in about three kilometres.'

  'Never been up here,' Pucetti said. 'Pretty.'

  Vianello nodded but said nothing.

  After a few minutes, a turn in the narrow road brought them within sight of a thick stone tower up ahead on their left. A high wall ran off at right angles from two sides of the tower and was soon lost among the budding trees that stood on either side of it.

  At a tap on his shoulder from Brunetti, Pucetti slowed as they reached the wall, and they drove along it for a few hundred metres. When Brunetti saw gates ahead of them, he tapped Pucetti on the shoulder again, signalling him to stop. He pulled on to the broad arc of gravel in front of the gates, angling the front of the car towards them. The three men got out.

  The file on the kidnapping had reported that the stone which blocked the gates on the inside was twenty centimetres wide at its narrowest point, yet the distance between the iron rungs of the gates, Brunetti saw when he held up his hand to measure them, was just a bit broader than his palm, no more than ten centimetres. He moved off to the left, following the wall, which was half again as tall as he.

  'If they had a ladder, I suppose’ Vianello called from where he stood, hands on hips and head bent back, looking up at the top of the gates. Before Brunetti could answer, he heard the sound of a car approaching from his left. A small white Fiat with two men in the front seat came into view. It slowed at the sight of Brunetti and the others, and the men in the car made no attempt to disguise their curiosity at the sight of the uniformed men and the blue and white police car. They moved off slowly, just as another car came from the right and passed them. This car, too, slowed to allow the occupants to stare at the police in front of the Lorenzoni villa.

  A ladder, Brunetti reflected, meant a van. Roberto had been kidnapped on the twenty-eighth of September, so the autumn foliage on the bushes at the side of the road could have provided sufficient cover for a vehicle of any kind, even a van.

  Brunetti went back to the gate and stood in front of the control panel of the alarm system attached to the column on the left. He pulled a small slip of paper from his pocket and glanced at it. Reading the numbers from it, he punched out a five-figure code on the control box. The red light on the front of the panel went out, and a green one at the bottom came on. A mechanical hum sounded from the back of the column, and the iron gates started to swing open.

  'How'd you know that?' Vianello asked.

  ‘It was in the original report’ Brunetti answered, not without a certain satisfaction at having thought to write the numbers down. The humming stopped: the gates stood fully open.

  It's private property, isn't it?' Vianello asked, leaving it to Brunetti to make the first step and, with it, give the order.

  ‘Yes, it is’ Brunetti answered. He walked through the gates and started up the gravel-covered driveway.

  Vianello motioned to Pucetti to stay outside and himself followed Brunetti through the gates and up the drive. Box hedges grew on either side, placed so close together as to create almost solid walls of green between them and the gardens that were sure to stand behind them. After about fifty metres, stone arches opened on either side, and Brunetti went through the one on the right. When Vianello came through behind him, he found Brunetti standing still, hands in the pockets of his trousers, coat flung back on either side. Brunetti studied the ground in front of them, a series of raised flowerbeds set within ordered gravel paths.

  Saying nothing, he turned and crossed the central path and went through the other arch, where he again stopped and looked around him. The meticulous order of path and flowerbeds was repeated here; a mirror image of the garden on the opposite side. Hyacinths, lilies of the valley, and crocuses basked in the sun, looking as though they, too, would like to put their hands in their pockets and have a look around.

  Vianello came to stand beside Brunetti. 'Well, sir?' he asked, not at all sure why Brunetti did nothing more than stand and study the flowers.

  'No stones, are there, Vianello?'

  Vianello, who hadn't paid attention, not really, to his surroundings, answered, 'No, sir. There aren't. Why?'

  'Assuming the layout hasn't changed much, that means that they'd have to bring it with them, doesn't it?'

  'And carry it over the wall with them?'

  Brunetti nodded. 'The local police did at least patrol the inside of the wall, the whole thing. Nothing was disturbed on the ground under it.' Turning to Vianello, he asked, 'What do you think that stone weighed?'

  'Fifteen kilos?' Vianello guessed. 'Ten?'

  Brunetti nodded. Neither had to comment on the difficulty of getting something that heavy over the wall.

  'Shall we have a look at the villa?' Brunetti asked, though neither he nor Vianello heard it as a question.

  Brunetti went back through the arch; Vianello followed him. Side by side, they started up the gravel pathway, which curved to the right. Off ahead of them a bird sang out joyously, and the rich scent of loam and heat filled the air.

  Vianello, who was looking at his feet while he walked, was at first conscious only of small stones splashing up towards his ankles and then of dust falling on to the tops of his shoes. The sound of the shot registered only after this. It was quickly followed by another, and the spurt of stones a metre behind where Vianello had been standing showed that this one would have found its target. But as the pebbles flew into the air, Vianello was already lying at the right side of the path, knocked there by Brunetti, the force of whose lunging push propelled him, stitimtnnmg,a few metres beyond-the fallen sergeant.

  Without conscious thought, Vianello pushed himself to his feet and, crouching low, ran towards the hedge. The solid wall of branches provided no hiding place, only a dark green wall against which his blue uniform would be less visible than again the white gravel.

  Another shot burst out, and then another. 'Back here, Vianello,' Brunetti shouted, and without looking to see where Brunetti was and still crouching low, Vianello ran towards the sound of his voice, vision dimmed by panic. Suddenly someone grabbed him by the left arm and dragged him off his feet. He saw an opening in the hedge and lurched through it like a beached seal, capable in his panic only of pushing himself forward with elbows and knees.

  His wild thrusts forward were stopped by something hard: Brunetti's knees. He rolled away, stumbled to his feet, and drew his revolver. His hand tremble
d.

  In front of him, Brunetti stood at a narrow opening left in the hedge by the removal of one of the bushes, his own revolver in his hand. Brunetti pulled himself back from the opening. 'You all right, Vianello?' he asked.

  'Yes,' was all he could think to say. Then, 'Thank you, sir.'

  Brunetti nodded, then crouched low and stuck his head out briefly from behind the protective branches of the trees.

  'You see anything?' Vianello asked.

  Brunetti gave a negative double grunt Behind them, from the direction of the gates, the sharp double bleat of the police siren ripped through the air. Both men turned towards it, listening to see if it drew any closer, but the noise seemed to remain stationary. Brunetti got to his feet.

  'Pucetti?' Vianello asked, thinking it unlikely that the local police could have got there so quickly.

  For a moment, Brunetti was willing to set out towards the villa in search of whoever it was that had fired at them, but then the sound of the siren slipped into his consciousness again, and good sense intervened. "Let's go back’ he said, turning towards the entrance and starting towards it, the path studded by the ranks of raised flowerbeds. 'He's probably called for help’

  They kept close to the hedge, and even when it curved sharply to the left and thus out of the line of fire from the villa, they kept inside of it, both of them reluctant to set foot on to the gravel path. Only when they were within sight of the stone wall did Brunetti feel safe enough to push his way, not without difficulty, through the thick branches and back on to the path.

  The gates were closed, but the police car was now parked directly in front, its passenger door touching the gates and effectively blocking the exit.

  When they got to within a few metres of the gate, Brunetti called out, shouting above the continuing sound of the car's pealing siren, 'Pucetti?'