by Donna Leon
Brunetti thought of her husband. ‘As you like.’
‘I could meet you in about twenty minutes,’ she suggested. ‘Would Campo Santa Margherita be convenient for you?’
‘Of course,’ he said, surprised at such a modest neighbourhood. ‘Where?’
‘There’s that gelateria on the side opposite the pharmacy.’
‘Causin,’ Brunetti supplied.
‘In twenty minutes?’
‘Fine.’
She was there when he arrived, sitting at a table at the back. She stood when she saw him enter, and he was struck anew by the conflict of her appearance. From the neck down, she looked like any casually dressed woman in her mid-thirties. Tight black jeans, expensive boots, a pale yellow cashmere sweater and a patterned silk scarf. Once his eyes rose above the scarf, however, everything changed, and he was looking at the sort of face usually reserved for the ageing wives of American politicians: too-tight skin, too-wide mouth, eyes pulled here and there by the attentions of surgeons.
He shook her hand, again noticing the firmness of her grasp.
They sat, a waitress appeared, and he could think of nothing he wanted to drink.
‘I’m going to have camomile tea,’ she said, and it suddenly seemed the only possible choice. He nodded, and the waitress went back to the counter.
Not knowing how to begin, he asked, ‘Do you come here often?’ feeling awkward at having begun with such a stupid question.
‘In the summer I do. We live quite close. I love ice-cream,’ she said. She glanced out of the large plate glass window. ‘And I love this campo. It’s so — I don’t know the right word — so full of life; there are always so many people here.’ She glanced at him and said, ‘I suppose this is the way it was years ago, a place where ordinary people lived.’
‘Do you mean the campo or the city?’ Brunetti asked.
Thoughtfully, she answered, ‘I suppose I must mean both. Maurizio talks about the way the city used to be, but I’ve never seen that. I’ve known it only as a foreigner, I suppose you could say, and not for very long.’
‘Well,’ Brunetti conceded, ‘not very long by Venetian time, perhaps.’
Brunetti judged they had spent enough time saying polite things and so said, ‘I finally read the Ovid.’
‘Ah,’ was her response. Then, ‘I suppose it wouldn’t have made any difference, not really, if you had read it any sooner.’
He wondered what difference it was meant to make, but he did not ask her that. Instead, he asked, ‘Would you tell me more about it?’
They were distracted by the waitress’s return. She carried a large tray with a teapot and a small jar of honey, along with cups and saucers. She set everything on the table, saying, ‘I remembered you like it with honey, Signora.’
‘How very kind of you,’ Marinello said, her smile in her voice. The waitress left; she lifted the top of the teapot and bounced the teabags up and down a few times, then replaced it. ‘I always think of Peter Rabbit when I drink this,’ she told Brunetti as she picked up the teapot. ‘His mother gave it to him when he was sick.’ She swirled the pot a few times.
Brunetti had read the book to the kids when they were small and remembered that this was true, but he said nothing.
She poured out the tea, spooned some honey into hers and pushed the bottle in his direction. Brunetti added some to his, trying to remember if old Signora Rabbit had added honey or not.
He knew the tea was too hot to drink, so he ignored it and asked, choosing not to return to a discussion of Ovid, ‘How did you meet him?’
‘Who? Antonio?’
‘Yes.’
She stirred the spoon around in her cup and set it in her saucer. Then she looked across at Brunetti. ‘If I tell you that, then I’ll have to tell you everything, won’t I?’
‘I’d like you to do that,’ Brunetti answered.
‘Well, then.’ She returned to stirring the tea. She glanced up, then back at her cup, and finally said, ‘My husband has many business contacts.’
Brunetti was silent. ‘Some of them are. . well, they are persons who. . persons he would prefer I knew nothing about.’
She looked to see that he was following and continued, ‘A few years ago, he began a collaboration. .’ She stopped herself short. ‘No, that’s too easy a word, I think; or too evasive. He hired a company run by people he knew to be criminals, though what he was doing was not illegal.’
She sipped at her tea, added more honey, and stirred it around. ‘I learned later,’ she began, and Brunetti made note of the fact that she did not say how she came to learn whatever it was she was about to tell him, ‘that it happened at dinner. He was out with the most important of them: they were celebrating their contract or their agreement or whatever they called it. I had refused to go with him, and Maurizio told them I was sick. It was the only thing he could think of that wouldn’t offend them. But they understood, and they were offended.’
She looked at him and said, ‘You have more experience with these people than I do, I suppose, so you know how important it is to them that they be respected.’ At Brunetti’s nod, she added, ‘I think part of it must have begun there, when Maurizio didn’t bring me to meet them.’ She shrugged and said, ‘It doesn’t matter, I suppose. But one does like to understand things.’
Suddenly, she said, ‘Drink your tea, Commissario. You don’t want it to get cold.’ Commissario, then, Brunetti thought. He did as he was told and drank some: it brought back his youth and being in bed with a cold or the flu.
‘When he told them that I was sick,’ she went on, ‘the man who had invited him asked what was wrong — I had had more dental work that day.’ She looked at him as if to see whether he understood the significance of this, and he nodded. ‘It was all part of the other thing.’
She drank more tea. ‘And Maurizio must have sensed their resentment because he told them more than he should have; at least, enough for them to understand what had happened. It must have been Antonio who asked about it.’ She looked at him again and said in a voice as cold as death, ‘Antonio could be very charming and sympathetic.’
Brunetti said nothing.
‘So Maurizio told them at least part of what had happened. And then he said something. .’ She paused and asked him: ‘Did you ever read the play about Becket and Henry the Somethingth?’
‘Second,’ Brunetti said.
‘So you know the part about the king’s asking his knights if no one would rid him of that pesky cleric, or something like that?’
‘Yes, I know it.’ The historian in him wanted to add that the story was probably apocryphal, but this did not seem the moment.
She stared into her cup and puzzled him by saying, ‘The Romans were so much more direct.’ Then she continued, as if she had not mentioned the Romans, ‘That’s what happened, I think. Maurizio told them what had happened, about the fake dentist and what he did, and that he had been in jail, and I suppose he said something about there being no justice in this country.’ It sounded to Brunetti as if she were repeating something she had learned by rote or had said — at least to herself — many times. She looked at him and added, in a softer voice, ‘It’s what people are always saying, isn’t it?’
She looked at her teacup, picked it up but did not drink. ‘I think that was all Antonio needed. A reason to hurt someone. Or worse.’ There was a faint clink as she set her cup back in the saucer.
‘Did he say anything to your husband?’
‘No, nothing. And I’m sure Maurizio must have thought that was the end of it.’
‘He didn’t tell you about the conversation?’ Brunetti asked, and at her confusion, explained, ‘Your husband, that is.’
Her astonishment was complete. ‘No, of course not. He doesn’t know I know anything about it.’ Then, in a much slower, softer voice, ‘That’s what this is all about.’
‘I see,’ was the only thing Brunetti could think of to say, though it seemed as if he was seeing less and less.
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‘Then, some months later, the dentist was killed. Maurizio and I were in America when it happened, but we heard about it when we got home. The police from Dolo came to ask us about it, but when Maurizio told them we had been in America, they went away.’ He thought she was finished, but then she added, in a different voice, ‘And the wife.’
She closed her eyes and said nothing for a long time. Brunetti finished his tea and poured them both some more.
‘It was Antonio, of course,’ she said conversationally.
Of course, thought Brunetti. ‘Did he tell your husband what he’d done?’ he asked, wondering if this was going to become a tale of blackmail, and that was why she had come to the Questura to speak to him.
‘No. He told me. He called and asked to come and see me — I don’t even remember what the excuse was. He said he was one of my husband’s business associates’ — she said the words with malice. ‘I told him to come to the apartment. And he told me.’
‘What did he say?’
‘What had happened. That Maurizio, at least according to him — Antonio, that is — had made it clear what he wanted to be done, and Antonio had done it.’ She looked at him, and he had the feeling she had said everything she had to say and was waiting for him to comment. ‘But that’s impossible,’ she added, trying to sound convinced.
Brunetti let some time pass and then asked, ‘Did you believe him?’
‘That Antonio had killed him?’
‘Yes.’
Just as she was about to answer, the high-pitched noise of a child’s delight flew in from the campo, and her eyes turned towards it. Not looking at Brunetti, she said, ‘It’s strange: that was the first time I saw Antonio, but it never occurred to me to doubt him.’
‘Did you believe that your husband asked him to do it?’
If Brunetti had expected her to be shocked by his question, he was disappointed. If she sounded anything, it was tired. ‘No. Maurizio couldn’t have done that,’ she said in a voice that tried to stave off doubt or discussion.
She turned her eyes back to Brunetti. ‘The most he could have done was talk about it; there’s no other way they could have known, is there?’ Her voice was painful to hear as she asked, ‘How else would Antonio have known the dentist’s name?’ She waited for some time, then said, ‘But Maurizio, no matter how much he might want it to happen, would not ask him do something like that.’
Brunetti said only, ‘I see. Did he say anything else when he came to see you?’
‘He told me that he was certain Maurizio would not want me to know about it. He started by suggesting that Maurizio had asked them to do it directly, but when he saw — Antonio was not stupid, you have to understand — that I couldn’t believe that, he changed the story and said that it might have been no more than a suggestion but that Maurizio had given them the name. I remember: he asked me if I thought there was any other reason Maurizio would have given them the name.’ Brunetti thought she had finished, but then she added, ‘And the wife.’
‘What did he want?’
‘He wanted me, Commissario,’ she said in a voice that had a savage edge to it. ‘I knew him for two years, and I know he was a man with. .’ She left the phrase hanging while she searched for the suitable words. ‘With unpleasant tastes.’ When Brunetti did not respond to the use of those words, she added, ‘Like Tarquin’s son, Commissario. Like Tarquin’s son.’
‘Did Terrasini threaten to call the police?’ Brunetti wondered, though that seemed unlikely, especially since he would be confessing to murder if he did.
‘Oh, no, nothing like that. He told me he was sure that my husband would not want me to know what he had done. No man, he said, would want his wife to know that.’ She turned her head to one side, and Brunetti noticed how tight the skin on her neck was. ‘He argued that Maurizio was responsible for what happened.’ She shook her head. ‘Antonio was not stupid, as I said.’ Then, soberly, ‘He went to Catholic schools. Jesuits.’
‘And so?’ Brunetti asked.
‘And so to keep Maurizio from learning that I knew what had happened, Antonio suggested that he and I come to an accommodation. That was his word: “accommodation”.’
‘Like Tarquin’s son with Lucrezia?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Exactly,’ she answered, sounding very tired. ‘If I agreed to the terms of this accommodation, then Maurizio would never learn that I knew he had told these people about the dentist or that he had given Antonio the idea to do — well — to do what he did. And the name.’ She put both hands on the sides of the teapot as if they had grown suddenly cold.
‘And so?’ Brunetti asked.
‘And so, to save my husband’s honour. .’ she began and when she saw his response, said, ‘Yes, Commissario, his honour, and to let him continue to believe that I respected and loved him — which I do, and did, and shall always do — well, I had one way to ensure that.’ She removed her hands from the warmth of the teapot and folded then neatly on the table in front of her.
‘I see,’ Brunetti said.
She drank more of her tea, thirstily, without bothering to add honey. ‘Do you find that strange?’
‘I’m not sure “strange” is the right word, Signora,’ Brunetti said evasively.
‘I would do anything to save my husband’s honour, Commissario, even if he had told them to do it,’ she said so fiercely that two women sitting at a table near the door turned to look at them.
‘In Australia, Maurizio was with me all the time. He was at the hospital all day, every day, then in my room when they would let him in. He left his businesses to run themselves and stayed with me. His son called and told him he had to come back, but he stayed with me. He held my hand and he cleaned me when I was sick.’ Her voice was low, passionate.
‘And then, when it was all over, after all the operations, he still loved me.’ Her eyes wandered away, off to the Antipodes. ‘The first time I saw myself, I had to go into the bathroom in the hospital to do it: there was no mirror in my room. Maurizio had had them all taken out, and at first, when the bandages came off, I didn’t give it a thought. But then I did begin to think about it and I asked him why there was no mirror.’
She laughed, low and musical; a beautiful sound. ‘And he told me he had never noticed, that maybe they didn’t have mirrors in hospital rooms in Australia. That night, after he was gone, I went down the corridor into the bathroom. And I saw this,’ she said, waving a hand under her chin.
She propped one elbow on the table and pressed three fingers against her mouth, staring off at that distant mirror. ‘It was horrible. To see that face and not be able to smile or frown or do anything with it, really.’ She took the fingers away. ‘And in the beginning it was a shock to see the way people looked at me. They couldn’t help it: they’d see this and a look of dull shock would appear on their faces, and then, a moment later, I’d see the puritanical disapproval, no matter how hard they tried to disguise or hide it. “La super liftata”,’ she said and he heard the rage in her voice. ‘I know what I’m called.’
Brunetti thought she was finished, but that was not so. ‘The next day I told Maurizio what I’d seen in the mirror, and he said it didn’t matter. I still remember the way he waved his hand and said, “sciochezze”, as if this face were the least important thing about me.’
She pushed the cup and saucer away from her. ‘And I believe he meant that, and means it still. To him, I’m still the young woman he married.’
‘And during these last two years?’ Brunetti asked.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked angrily.
‘Has he never suspected?’
‘What? That Antonio was my — what do I call him? — my lover?’
‘Hardly,’ Brunetti said. ‘Has he suspected?’
‘I hope not,’ she said instantly. ‘But I don’t know what he knows, or if he can let himself think about it. He knew that I spent time with Antonio, and I think. . I think he was afraid to ask. And I couldn’t tell him anything, could
I?’ She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. ‘It’s all such a cliché, isn’t it? The old man with the young wife. Of course she’ll take a young lover.’
‘“And so on both sides is simple truth suppressed,”’ Brunetti surprised himself by saying.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘Sorry, something my wife says,’ Brunetti answered, not explaining, not knowing himself how he had dredged that up.
‘Could you tell me about last night?’ he asked.
‘There’s little to say, really,’ she answered, again sounding very tired. ‘He told me to meet him there, and I’d got used to obeying him. So I went.’
‘And your husband?’
‘He’s become as accustomed to it as I have, I suppose,’ she said. ‘I told him I was going out, and he didn’t ask me anything.’
‘You didn’t get home until morning, did you?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I’m afraid Maurizio’s grown accustomed to that, as well.’ Her voice was bleak.
‘Ah,’ was the only thing Brunetti could find to say. Then, ‘What happened?’
She propped her elbows on the table and put her chin on her folded hands. ‘Why should I tell you that, Commissario?’
‘Because, sooner or later, you are going to have to tell someone, and I’m a good choice,’ he said, meaning both.
Her eyes, he thought, grew softer, and she said, ‘I knew that anyone who liked Cicero so much had to be a good man.’
‘I’m not,’ he said, meaning that, as well. ‘But I’m curious and, if I can — and within the limits of the law — I’d like to be able to help you.’
‘Cicero spent his life lying, didn’t he?’ she asked.
Brunetti’s first response was to be insulted, but then he realized that what he was hearing was a question, not a comparison. ‘Do you mean in the legal cases?’
‘Yes. He twisted evidence, certainly bribed every witness he could get money to, distorted the truth, and probably used every cheap trick lawyers have ever used.’ She seemed pleased with the list.
‘But not in his private life,’ Brunetti said. ‘Perhaps he was vain, and weak, but in the end he was an honest man, I think. And a brave one.’
