A Noble Radiance

by Donna Leon

  The Count was visibly surprised by this. 'Why there?'

  'Because I'm arresting you, Ludovico Lorenzoni, for the murder of your son and the murder of your nephew.'

  The confusion on the Count's face could not have been more real. 'But I just told you. Roberto died of natural causes. And Maurizio tried to murder me.' He pushed himself to his feet but stayed behind his desk. He reached down, moved a paper from one side to the other, pushed the computer keyboard a bit more to the left. But he found nothing further to say.

  'As I told you, you can call your lawyer, but then you must come with me’

  He saw the Count give in, a change as subtle as that which marked the beginning of the lies, though Brunetti knew that they would never stop now.

  'May I say goodbye to my wife?' he asked. 'Yes. Of course.'

  Wordlessly, the Count came around the desk, walked in front of Brunetti, and left the room.

  Brunetti went over to the window behind the desk and looked out over the rooftops. He hoped the Count would do the honourable thing. He had let him go, uncertain about what other guns might be in the house. The Count was trapped by his own admission, his wife knew him to be a killer, his reputation and that of his family was soon to be in ruins, and a weapon might be somewhere in the house. If he were an honourable man, the Count would do the honourable thing.

  Yet Brunetti knew he would not.

  27

  'But what does it matter if he's punished or not?' Paola asked him three nights later, after the feeding frenzy of the press that had greeted the Count's arrest had quieted down. 'His son is dead. His nephew's dead. His wife knows he killed them. His reputation is ruined. He's an old man, and he'll die in prison.' She sat on the side of the bed, wearing one of Brunetti's old bathrobes and a heavy woollen sweater on top of it. 'What else do you want to happen to him?'

  Brunetti was sitting in bed, covers drawn up to his chest, and had been reading when she came into the room, bringing him a large mug of heavily honeyed tea. She handed him the mug, nodded to tell him that, yes, she'd thought to add cognac and lemon, and sat down beside him.

  As he took his first sip, she pushed aside the newspapers that lay scattered on the floor beside their bed. The Count's face looked up from page four, pushed there by a Mafia killing in Palermo, the first in weeks. In the time that had elapsed since the Count's arrest, Brunetti had not spoken of him, and Paola had respected his silence. But now she wanted him to talk, not because she relished discussing a parent who murdered a child, but because she knew from long experience that it would help Brunetti to rid himself of the pain of the case.

  She asked him what he thought would happen to the Count, and as he answered, she took the mug from him now and again and sipped at the hot liquid as he explained the manoeuvres of the Count's lawyers, now three of them, and his general feeling about what was likely to happen. It was impossible for him to disguise, especially from Paola, his disgust at the thought that the two murders would most likely go unpunished and the Count to jail only for the transport of illegal substances, for he now claimed that Maurizio had masterminded the kidnapping.

  Already the force of the paid press had been called into action, and every front page in the country, not to mention what passes for editorial comment in Italy, had carried stories lamenting the sad fate of this nobleman, this noble man, to have been so deceived by a person of his own blood, and what crueller fate could there be than to have nursed this viper in the bosom of his family for more than a decade, only to have him turn and bite, strike to the heart. And gradually, popular feeling responded to the prevailing wind of words. The idea of traffic in nuclear armaments faded, smothered under the weight of euphemism that transmuted the crime into 'trafficking in illegal substances', as though those deadly pellets, strong enough to vaporize a city, were the equivalent of say, Iranian caviare or ivory statuettes. Roberto's temporary grave was checked by a team of men carrying Geiger counters, but no trace of contamination was found.

  The books and records of the Lorenzoni companies had been sequestered, and a team of police accountants and computer experts had pored over them for days, trying to trace the shipment that would have taken the contents of the suitcase on to the client the Count still said he couldn't identify. The only shipment they found that seemed at all suspicious was ten thousand plastic syringes sent from Venice to Istanbul by ship two weeks before Roberto's disappearance. The Turkish police sent back word that the company in Istanbul had records which showed that the syringes had been sent on by truck to Tehran, where the trail ended.

  'He did it,' Brunetti insisted, his voice and his feelings no less fierce than they had been days ago, when he'd taken the Count to the Questura. Even then, at the very beginning, he'd been outmanoeuvred, for the Count had insisted that a police launch be sent for him: Lorenzonis do not walk, not even to prison. When Brunetti had refused, the Count had called a water taxi, and he and the policeman who arrested him arrived at the Questura a half hour later. There they found the press already in place. No one ever discovered who made the call.

  From the very beginning, the whole affair had been presented to appeal to pity, replete with the sort of vacuous sentimentality Brunetti so disliked in his countrymen. Photos had appeared, summoned up by the magician's hand of cheap emotion: Roberto at his eighteenth birthday party, sitting with his arm around his father's shoulder; a decades' old photo of the Countess dancing in the arms of her husband, both of them sleek and gleaming with youth and wealth; and even poor Maurizio managed to get his face shown, walking along the Riva degli Schiavoni, a poignant three steps behind his cousin Roberto.

  Frasetti and Mascarini had presented themselves at the Questura two days after the Count's arrest, accompanied there by two of Conte Lorenzoni's lawyers. Yes, it was Maurizio who had hired them, Maurizio who had planned the kidnapping and told them what to do. They insisted that Roberto had died of natural causes; it was Maurizio who had ordered them to shoot his dead cousin and thus disguise the cause of death. And they had both insisted that they be given complete medical exams to determine if they had suffered contamination during their time with their victim. The tests were negative.

  'He did it,' Brunetti repeated, taking the mug back and finishing the tea. He turned to the side and reached out to place it on the table beside the bed, but Paola took it from him and cradled the still-warm mug in her hands.

  'And he'll go to jail,' Paola said.

  'I don't care about that,'. Brunetti said.

  Then what do you care about?'

  Brunetti sank lower on the bed, hiked the covers up closer to his chin. 'Would you laugh if I said I cared about the truth?' he asked.

  She shook her head. 'No, of course not. But does it matter?'

  He slipped one hand out from under the covers, took the mug from her and placed it on the table, then took her hands in his. 'It matters to me, I think.'

  'Why?' she asked, though she probably knew.

  'Because I hate to see people like this, people like him, going through life and never having to pay for what they do.'

  'Don't you think the death of his son and his nephew is enough?'

  ‘Paola, he sent the men to kill the boy, to kidnap him and then kill him. And he killed his nephew in cold blood.'

  'You don't know that,' she answered.

  He shook his head. 'I can't prove it, and I'll never be able to prove it. But I know it as well as if I had been there.' Paola said nothing to this, and their conversation stopped for a minute or so.

  Finally Brunetti said, "The boy was going to die. But think of what happened to him before that, the terror, the uncertainty about what was going to happen to him. That’s what I'll never forgive him.'

  It's not your place to forgive, is it, Guido?' she asked, but her voice was kind.

  He smiled at this and shook his head. 'No, it's not. But you know what I mean.' When Paola didn't answer, he asked, 'Don't you?'

  She nodded and squeezed his hand. 'Yes.' And then again,
‘Yes.'

  'What would you do?' he asked her suddenly.

  Paola released his hand and brushed back a lock of hair that had fallen across her eyes. 'What do you mean? If I were a judge? Or if I were Roberto's mother? Or if I were you?'

  He smiled again. 'That sounds like you're telling me to leave it alone, doesn't it?'

  Paola stood and then bent to pick up the newspapers. She folded and stacked them, then turned to the bed. 'I've been thinking lately about the Bible,' she said, amazing Brunetti, who knew her to be the most unreligious of people.

  'That part about an eye for an eye,' she continued. He nodded, and she went on. 'In the past, I always looked at it as one of the worst things that particularly unpleasant god had to say, crying for vengeance, thirsting after blood.' She pulled the papers towards her breast and glanced away from him, considering how to phrase this.

  She looked down at him. 'But recently ifs occurred to me that what it might be enjoining us to is just the opposite.'

  ‘I don't understand,' he said.

  'That instead of demanding an eye and a tooth, ifs really telling us that there are limits; that, if we lose an eye, we can't ask anything more than a eye, and if we lose a tooth, then all we can get is a tooth, not a hand or,' and here she paused again, 'a heart.' She smiled again, bent down and kissed his cheek, the newspapers crinkling in protest.

  When she stood, she said, ‘I’ll tie these into a bundle. Is the string in the kitchen?'

  'Yes, it is,' he answered.

  She nodded and left the room.

  Brunetti picked up his glasses and his copy of Cicero and went back to reading. More than an hour later’ the phone rang, but someone picked it up before he could answer it.

  He waited for a minute, but Paola didn't call him. He returned his attention to Cicero; there was no one who could call that he wanted to talk to.

  A few minutes later, Paola came into the bedroom. 'Guido’ she said, 'that was Vianello’

  Brunetti put his book face down on the covers and peered at her over the top of his glasses. 'What?' he asked.

  'Countess Lorenzoni’ Paola began, then closed her eyes and stopped.

  ‘What?'

  'She's hanged herself.'

  Before giving it thought, Brunetti whispered, 'Ah, the poor man’