The Temptation of Forgiveness

by Donna Leon

  The boy started to speak, but his voice failed to find words and turned into a light moan. It lasted a few seconds, and then he asked, ‘Is he going to die?’

  That brought his mother to her feet and to his side. Wrapping her arms around him, she said in a voice Brunetti could hear struggling to remain calm and hoped the boy could not, ‘Don’t be silly, Sandro. He’s got two nurses and the best doctor in the hospital. You and Aurelia can come and see him tomorrow.’ She turned to Brunetti for confirmation. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  ‘If Dottor Stampini says it’s all right, I’m sure they can.’ Brunetti nodded to the woman and took the opportunity to leave. As he reached the door, he heard three sharp, barking sobs, but a sense of decency stopped him from turning to see which one of them it was.

  14

  As he let himself out of the building, Brunetti felt that the day had decided not to throw in its lot with winter quite yet and had returned to early autumn: by the time he reached Campo San Cassiano, he was sweating under his jacket. He thought about taking off his coat, but when he recalled the route he’d have to take to get home for lunch, all in the shade, he merely unbuttoned it and pulled it open for a moment. He turned to face the sun, feeling rather like a late-season sunflower trying to beat the odds.

  Had the sun been an old friend, packing and preparing for a three-month vacation, Brunetti would have told him he’d miss him and wish him a good time, down there in Argentina and New Zealand, spending the winter months – wisely – by the sea and staying warm. When he turned into Ruga Vecchia San Giovanni, he was proven right and rebuttoned his coat for the rest of the walk home.

  Brunetti couldn’t shake himself free of the thought of Gianluca Fornari. He pulled out his phone and dialled Signorina Elettra’s number while climbing the first flight of stairs.

  ‘Good morning, Commissario,’ she said pleasantly, as though a call from him was what she’d been waiting for since she arrived in the office. Before he could ask, she said, ‘Signor Fornari has been known to us for some time. Since he was eighteen, as a matter of fact.’ Brunetti was about to say he was surprised that a man well known to them would have restrained himself until he was an adult, when she continued, saying, ‘He has a file with the Juvenile Office, but I didn’t want to go looking around in there so soon after making inquiries about Alessandro Gasparini.’

  Ah, she was calling it ‘making inquiries’ now, was she? Brunetti threw that thought to the ground and pinned it there with his foot while he asked, ‘And the file he has with us?’

  ‘He’s spent eleven of the last twenty years as a guest of the state,’ she answered, gave a little grunt, as though stretching to retrieve something just at the end of arm’s reach, then said, ‘Ah, yes, here it is. Five years for a series of robberies in Mestre and Marghera – he was in prison from when he was twenty until he was twenty-five – and then three more – from when he was twenty-nine until he was thirty two – for selling drugs to minors in Padova.’

  Brunetti heard a page turning. ‘He was thirty-four when he went in again. Same crime, selling drugs. But he was released a year and a half ago.’

  ‘And since then?’

  ‘I can’t find any record of employment. There’s no sign that he’s paid taxes in those years.’ As was common with most people today, the way she said this suggested approval, though with Signorina Elettra, Brunetti was never certain what her sentiments were.

  He reflected on what she must have done in order to get that information, and he marvelled: she could get in, even there. ‘Has he been in any trouble with us since then?’ he asked calmly.

  ‘Nothing. I called the Vigili Urbani to ask if they’d had any contact with him. A few of them remembered him from years ago, but no one could recall having had anything to do with him, even seeing him, for a long time.’ After a moment, she added, ‘One of them said he’s married and said the wife is a good woman. No children.’

  ‘And now he’s selling drugs to the kids at the Albertini?’ It did not occur to Brunetti to question the information Manrico had given him.

  ‘I’ve no idea, Dottore,’ she said. ‘I’ll see what else I can find.’ He was about to end the call, when she added, ‘I checked their phone records, and there were no calls between him and Gasparini.’

  Arrived at the landing in front of the door to his apartment, he thanked her for the information she’d found. ‘I’ll be in about three,’ he added, said goodbye, and broke the connection.

  He put the phone in one pocket, took his keys from another, and let himself in. He did a human radar scan of the house and concluded that no one was home. It was then that he remembered: the chairman of Paola’s department had requested her – ‘begged’ was the word she’d used when telling him why she wouldn’t be home – to sit in on an interview with one of the people who had applied for a teaching position; Raffi was playing basketball, and Chiara’s Art History class was being shown the Restoration Laboratory at the Accademia Museum. Paola would no doubt be invited to an expensive lunch in return for her time, the kids would have fun, while he had no choice but to search for leftovers in the refrigerator and eat alone, with only the newspaper for company, unless Paola had taken that with her to read during the interview. ‘Oh, you do whine, don’t you, just?’ he asked himself aloud.

  He went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, where he found a saucepan and, on the shelf below, a dish covered with aluminium foil. He pulled them out, placed them on the counter, and took the lid from the pan. Cream of celery root soup. The other had a note on top: ‘You don’t have to heat them.’ Peeling back the foil, he saw what looked like veal meatballs wrapped in speck.

  Turning on the oven, he stuck the plate inside, then put the pan on the stove and turned the flame to medium. He pulled down a bowl and took a glass from the cabinet. Leaving the soup to heat, he went back to the bedroom and picked up his copy of Antigone, which he had left face-down last night.

  Back in the kitchen, he pinned it flat with a serving spoon and a small plate from the drying rack. He found another spoon and stirred the soup, then licked the spoon to test how hot it was.

  He sliced some bread, looked in the refrigerator again and quelled his disappointment at not finding a salad. He stirred the soup, filled a glass from the tap, not because of Chiara’s sensibilities but because he was too lazy to open a bottle of mineral water, and sat at the table.

  He found his place and looked for the scene where he had left off the previous night. His eye fell on something he had underlined decades ago, when he read the play at school. As he recalled, it was something Ismene had said: Ismene, ever wise, ever cautious, ever subservient. There it was, with his own, decades-old fading, faint underlining: ‘I must obey the ones in power.’ He glanced away, trying to imagine what he, an eighteen-year-old boy, had understood of power and its uses.

  He smelled something burning and ignored it, thinking that his imagination had caught the scent of the funeral pyre on which the body of Eteocles, the loyal brother, had been burned with full honours, his traitorous brother’s body abandoned to scavengers.

  That smell again. He turned aside and saw the steam rising from the saucepan. ‘Oddio,’ he muttered, jumped to his feet and grabbed at the handle. He pulled the pan off the flame and set it on the marble counter, hoping it was not burned irredeemably.

  He found a soup bowl and poured it out, then tipped the pan a bit to the side, the better to see down to the bottom. It looked all right, so he stirred the rest around a few times, added it to his bowl and carried it to his place. He took a sip of water and set the glass to the right of the bowl and went back to his reading while he waited for the soup to cool.

  Creon now, prating away in that voice so favoured by powerful men: how they loved to hear themselves use it, and they probably loved to hear it in those they judged to be their equals. Simple thoughts, simple ideas, simple commands. ‘See that you never side with the people who disobey my orders,’ the King commands, and the lead
er of the Chorus falls over himself in his haste to agree: ‘Never. Only a fool would be so much in love with death.’

  After the sentry reports the crude attempt at burial, Creon unleashes the ultimate weapon of the bully: sarcasm. ‘When were the gods last seen helping traitors?’

  Brunetti took a receipt from Rosa Salva from his pocket and slipped it into the page and closed the book. Knowing that to continue to read would cause him to pay no attention to his lunch, he pushed the book to the other side of the table and began to eat. He wished only that Paola had left him that day’s Gazzettino, for its ham-fisted, factual accounts of death and misery could in no way trouble him to the degree that Sophocles’ world of invention and fancy did.

  When he returned to the Questura, he asked about Vianello, but there had been neither sight nor sound of the Inspector. Griffoni had come in at one but had gone out for lunch and was not yet back. As he went up the stairs to his office, he tried to think of what he would do if he wanted to sell drugs to students but did not want to risk arrest.

  He did his best thinking at the window, so he went and studied the façade of the church of San Lorenzo and considered the possibilities. Fornari could have one of the students do the selling for him, but this would not change his legal liability, might even worsen it, should the student be apprehended. And he’d have to share the profit, hardly a wise decision. The important thing would be to limit or, better, eliminate direct contact between himself and his customers. So long as he did not actually put the drugs into the hands of a minor, there was no serious crime involved. Therefore, he’d have to find a place to leave the drugs and a reliable person who would see to the sale.

  Once the students knew where the drugs were available, they had only to go there, hand over their money, and get them. Not entirely whimsically, Brunetti asked himself if, in ten years, drugs would be delivered by drone.

  He remembered a friend of his mother, insatiably curious about the doings of her neighbours and a gossip of majestic proportions. Whenever his mother saw her go by, she would tell her son that the woman was on her way to ‘curiosare’, one of his mother’s uses of language. If only she’d had the advantage of schooling beyond the fourth grade, what might she have done? He’d never told anyone, not even Paola, how much he missed her still.

  He had no clear idea of the situation or arrangement that might make the sale of drugs invisible, thus there was nothing for it other than to go over to the Albertini and ‘curiosare’.

  He heard someone knock at his door and called out, ‘Avanti.’ Vianello came in and closed the door after him. The grin on his face remained there as he approached Brunetti’s desk and took one of the chairs in front of it.

  Brunetti walked back to his desk and sat. Vianello said nothing. ‘All right, Lorenzo,’ Brunetti finally declared, ‘you can stop grinning now and tell me what happened.’

  The Inspector slumped down in the chair and stretched his legs out in front of him. He crossed his ankles and observed the tops of his shoes.

  ‘Are you going to sit there and preen, or are you going to tell me?’ Brunetti asked in false exasperation.

  Vianello’s grin disappeared. ‘I got there before they were ready to begin the interrogation this morning. Pastore, the man I was working with, said he wanted to show me some of the things they found in the thief’s apartment when he was arrested.’

  Brunetti shifted in his chair and folded his arms across his chest.

  ‘All right, all right,’ Vianello said quite amiably. He took an envelope from his inside pocket and placed it on the desk in front of Brunetti. ‘Have a look.’ He pointed to the envelope with conscious melodrama.

  Brunetti lifted the flap and saw some sheets of paper. He pulled them out, unfolded all three, and spread them flat in a row on the desk in front of him. He saw colour photocopies of what looked like photos of three paintings, all portraits of women. In the first, a black servant held a red umbrella above the subject’s head; in the second, the woman had eyes of different sizes; and the third showed a very robust naked woman bending forward to wipe her feet with a towel.

  ‘Bordoni,’ Brunetti said, recognizing them instantly. ‘The guy they were questioning had these? In his apartment?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Brunetti rapped the back of his fingers against the three sheets of paper in turn and asked, ‘Did he have these photocopies of the paintings or the paintings themselves?’

  ‘Only the photocopies,’ Vianello answered.

  ‘And the paintings?’

  Vianello shook his head. ‘There were a lot of things in his apartment, but no paintings.’

  ‘What did they find?’

  ‘There were photos of other paintings. He also had a number of watches, jewellery, some Renaissance brasses, a small Roman statue of a goddess, an Iznik tile, and about twelve thousand dollars. In dollars.’

  ‘Any of this reported missing?’

  ‘They’ve found the owners of the tile and four of the watches. They’re looking through their records to see if any of the other things have been reported stolen.’

  Brunetti considered what his friend had told him. ‘So he’s a professional.’

  ‘It would seem so.’

  ‘The fact that he has photocopies of these paintings means either that he photographed and then copied them after he stole them …’

  ‘So he could show them to prospective clients,’ Vianello finished for him.

  ‘Or that he was given the photocopies by someone else to show him exactly which paintings to take,’ Brunetti finished, and this time Vianello nodded.

  They sat silent for a while, considering possibilities.

  ‘What has his wife said?’

  ‘Nothing. She said she thought her husband sold fire insurance,’ Vianello said with a straight face.

  ‘Fire insurance?’ Brunetti asked. ‘How did she explain the things in their house?’

  ‘She didn’t. She said her husband had always had good taste.’

  ‘Who called to report the domestic violence?’

  ‘The people in the apartment across from them,’ Vianello answered.

  ‘How does he explain the objects in the apartment?’ Brunetti asked.

  Straight-faced, Vianello said, ‘Some of them were in a briefcase he found on a train.’

  ‘But didn’t report finding?’

  ‘He said he didn’t think there was any law that said he had to.’

  Brunetti ignored this and asked, ‘Does he have a history with us?’

  ‘He’s been arrested for burglary seven times. Six years in jail, total.’

  ‘Did anyone ask him about the photocopies?’

  ‘Yes. He said he didn’t want to throw them away because, if he ever found the owner of the briefcase, he’d probably want to get everything back.’

  It took Brunetti some time to answer, and when he did, all he could think of to say was, ‘I see.’ Then he asked, ‘Will you talk to him about these?’ tapping a finger on the girl with different-sized eyes.

  ‘Tomorrow. Pastore said I can have a half-hour with him while they’re on their coffee break.’

  ‘Long break,’ Brunetti observed.

  ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ Vianello agreed. ‘I figured it could take some time to persuade him that it might be wise to agree to a trade. He tells me where he got the photocopies, and I tell my friends he’s been cooperative with us.’

  Brunetti picked up the photocopies one by one and studied them. The frame on the portrait of the woman under the umbrella was simple black, undecorated. The woman wiping her feet was surrounded by a golden frame, ornamented with tiny carved wooden rosettes. The photocopy of the painting of the woman with the strange eyes showed it had been unframed. He went back and looked at the naked woman and noticed that, on the far right, at a small distance from the tiny rosettes of her frame, a thin black vertical bar bled to the side of the photocopy and seemed to extend both above and below the painting. The woman with the odd eyes had th
e same black bar a bit to the left of the unframed edge of her portrait. As with the other painting, the black bar extended above and below the edge of the portrait.

  Brunetti stared at the three paintings for a long time. Then he picked up the photocopy of the woman under the umbrella and folded the sheet of paper vertically so that the black frame of the painting was at the edge of the photocopy, as well. He took the other two photos and folded their sides vertically so that the black frame of the centre painting became the black vertical bars that ran so close to the sides of the other paintings.

  He set them in a horizontal row and they became a sort of female triptych, the black frame of the central portrait now equidistant from and longer than the other two paintings.

  Brunetti looked at Vianello. ‘Is this the way they were hanging in the Bordonis’ apartment?

  The Inspector nodded and smiled. ‘You’re very clever, Guido. It took me much longer, and I had to call Bocchese to look at the photo Dottor Bordoni gave us of how the paintings were originally hung.’

  ‘So the original photo was taken in their home? Before the robbery?’

  ‘Presumably.’

  Brunetti studied the three photocopies again. In a house as filled with art and paintings as the Bordonis’, a thief would have far less trouble if he had a road map with easily understandable signs.

  ‘This is what you want to trade?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Exactly what I told you, Guido: he gives me the name of the person who took the photo, and in return I speak a few words to my friends.’

  ‘Will your friends agree?’ Brunetti asked.

  Startled by the question, Vianello sat up straight. ‘They already have. They’ll speak to the magistrate and explain that he’s been a very helpful witness.’

  Brunetti smiled and said, ‘I’m surprised you didn’t ask them to tell the magistrate he probably did find the bag on a train.’

  ‘I thought about it,’ Vianello said in a voice filled with regret. ‘But with the record he has, my friends weren’t willing to go that far.’