A Venetian Reckoning (23 page)

The waiter handed the glasses to
della Corte and went back across the restaurant, towards the door that led to
the kitchen.

'Why don't they break?' della Corte
asked, holding the glasses in one hand and twisting at them with the other,
bending them just as the waiter had.

'Titanium,' Brunetti answered, though
the question had been entirely rhetorical.

'What?' della Corte asked.

'Titanium,' Brunetti repeated. 'My
wife bought a new pair of reading glasses last month, and she told me about
these. May I?' he asked, reaching for them. Della Corte handed them over, and
Brunetti brought them close to his eyes, searching for a manufacturer's sign.
He found it, inside the right earpiece, up close to the hinge. 'See,' he said,
extending them to della Corte.

'What is it?' della Corte asked. 'I
don't have my own glasses with me.'

'It's Japanese,' Brunetti said. 'At
least I think it is. It's only the Japanese who make these.'

'The Japanese?' della Corte asked.
'They make glasses?'

"They make the frames,' Brunetti
explained. 'And these frames, I'd say, cost almost a million lire. At least that's
what my wife told me. If they're titanium, and I think these are’ he said,
twisting them once more into a painful shape and then releasing them suddenly
and watching them snap back into shape, 'men that's what they cost'

Brunetti's smile blossomed and he
looked down at the glasses as though they had been transformed back into a
million lire, and he'd been told to keep them

'What are you smiling at?' della
Corte asked.

'Frames that cost a million lire’
Brunetti explained, 'especially frames that are imported from Japan, ought to
be very easy to trace.'

The same million lire appeared, but
this time they were in della Corte's smile.

21

It was Brunetti’s suggestion that
they take the glasses to an optician and have the prescription of the lenses
examined to make it even easier to identify them. Because the frames were not
only expensive but imported, they should have been easy to trace, but this was
to ignore the fact that della Corte, having been ordered to treat Favero's
death as a suicide, had to use his own time to search for the optician who sold
them, just as it was to ignore the possibility that they had been purchased in
some city other than Padua.

Brunetti did what he could, assigning
one of his junior officers the task of phoning all of the opticians in the
Mestre-Venice area to ask if they carried those particular frames and, if so,
whether they had ever rilled them with that prescription. He then returned his
attention to the Trevisan-Lotto-Martucci triangle, his interest centred on the
survivors, both of whom would profit in some way from Trevisan's death. The
widow would probably inherit, and Martucci might well inherit the widow.
Lotto's murder, however, was difficult to fit into any pattern Brunetti
envisioned that involved Martucci and Signora Trevisan. He did not for a moment
question the fact that husbands and wives

would want to, and often did, kill
one another, but he found it difficult to believe that a sister would kill a
brother. Husbands, even children, can be replaced, but one's aged parents can
never produce another son. Antigone had sacrificed her life to this truth.
Brunetti realized he needed to speak to both Signora Trevisan and Avvocato
Martucci again, and he thought it would be interesting to speak to them
together and see how things fell out.

Before he did anything about that,
however, he turned his attention to the papers that had accumulated on his
desk. There was, as promised, the list of Trevisan's clients, seven
close-typed pages that held names and addresses in perfect and perfectly
neutral alphabetical order. He glanced through it quickly, running his eyes
down the column of names. At a few, he whistled under his breath: it appeared
that Trevisan had planted his standard firmly among the ranks of the wealthiest
citizens of the city as well as among those who passed for its nobility.
Brunetti flipped back to the first page and began to read the names carefully.
He realized that the attention he was giving them would, to a non-Venetian,
pass for sober reflection; anyone bred on the incestuous rumours and cabals of
the city would realize that he was doing no more than dredging up gossip, slur,
and slander as he considered each name. There was Baggio, the Director of the
port, a man accustomed to power and its ruthless employment. There was Seno,
owner of the largest glass-making workshop on Murano, employer of more than
three hundred people, a man whose competitors seemed to share the common
misfortune of being hit by strikes and unexplained fires. And there was
Brandoni, Conte Brandoni, the exact source of whose immense wealth was as
obscure as the origin of bis tide.

Some of the people on the list did
have the most blameless, even the highest, of reputations; what Brunetti found
peculiar was the promiscuity of names, the revered rubbing elbows with the
suspect, the most highly honoured mingling with the equivocal. He turned back
to the Fs and searched for his father-in-law's name, but Conte Orazio Falier
was not listed. Brunetti laid the list aside, knowing that they would have no
choice but to question all of them, one by one, and reproving himself for his
reluctance to call his father-in-law to ask what he knew about Trevisan. Or
about his clients.

Below the list, there was a painfully
typed and inordinately long message from Officer Gravini, explaining that the
Brazilian whore and her pimp had appeared at Pinetta's bar the previous night
and that he had 'initiated' an arrest, initiated?' Brunetti heard himself
asking aloud. That's the sort of thing that came of allowing university
graduates into the ranks. When Brunetti called downstairs and asked where they
were, he learned that both had been brought over from the gaol that morning and
were being kept in separate rooms on Officer Gravini's recommendation in case
Brunetti wanted to question them.

Next was a fax from the police in
Padua, reporting that the bullets recovered from Lotto's body came from a .22
calibre pistol, though no tests had yet been performed to determine whether it
was the same pistol used on Trevisan. Brunetti knew that any tests would do no
more than confirm what he already knew in his blood.

Below that were more sheets of fax
papers, these bearing the SIP letterhead and containing the phone records he
had asked Signorina Elettra to obtain from Giorgio. At the thought of Rondini
and the many lists he had provided, Brunetti remembered the letter he had to
write and the fact that he had not yet bothered to do so. The fact that Rondini
felt he needed such a letter to give to his fiancee left Brunetti bemused that
he would want to marry her, but he had long ago abandoned the idea that he
understood marriage.

Brunetti admitted to himself that he
also had no idea of what he hoped to learn from either Mara or her pimp, but he
decided to go and speak to them anyway. He walked down to the first floor,
which contained three separate cell-like rooms in which the police routinely
interviewed suspects and others brought in for questioning.

Outside one of the rooms stood
Gravini, a handsome young man who had joined the force a year ago, having spent
the previous two trying to find someone who would give a job to a
twenty-seven-year-old university graduate with a degree in philosophy and no
previous work experience. Brunetti often wondered what had impelled Gravini to
that decision, which philosopher's precepts had moved him to take on the
jacket, pistol, and cap of the forces of order. Or, the thought sneaked out
from nowhere and leaped into Brunetti's mind, perhaps Gravini had found in
Vice-Questore Patta the living manifestation of Plato's philosopher king.

'Good morning, sir,' Gravini said,
snapping out a quick salute and demonstrating no surprise at the fact that his
superior arrived laughing to himself. Philosophers, it is rumoured, bear with
these things.

'Which of them's in here?’ Brunetti
asked, nodding his head at the door behind Gravini.

The woman, sir.' Saying this, Gravini
handed Brunetti a dark-blue file. The man's record's in here, sir. Nothing on
her.'

Brunetti took the file and glanced at
the two pages stapled to the inside cover. There was the usual: assault,
selling drugs, living off the earnings of a prostitute. Franco Silvestri was
one of thousands. After reading through it carefully, he handed the file back
to Gravini.

'Did you have any trouble bringing
them in?'

'Not her, sir. It was almost as if
she was expecting it. But the man tried to make a run for it. Ruffo and Vallot
were with me, outside, and they grabbed him.'

'Well done, Gravini. Whose idea was
it to take them along?'

'Well, sir,' Gravini said, with a low
cough. 'I told them what I was going to do, and they offered to come along. On
their own time, you understand'

'You get along well with them, don't
you, Gravini?'

'Yes, sir, I do'

'Good, good Well, let's have a look
at her.’ Brunetti let himself into the grim little room. The only light came
from a small, dirty window high on one wall, far higher than a person could
hope to jump, and from a single 60-watt bulb in a wire-covered fixture in the
centre of the ceiling.

Mara sat on the edge of one of the
three chairs. There was no other furniture, no table, no sink, nothing but
three straight-backed chairs and, on the floor, a scattering of cigarette
butts. She looked up when Brunetti came in, recognized him, and said, 'Good
morning' in a relaxed voice. She looked tired, as if she'd not slept well the
night before, but she didn't look particularly disturbed to find herself here.
On the back of a chair hung the same leopard-skin jacket she had worn the other
night, but her blouse and skirt were new, though they both looked as though she
had slept in them. Her make-up had worn off’ or she had washed it off; either
way, its absence made her look younger, little more than an adolescent,

'You've done this before, I imagine?'
Brunetti asked, sitting in the third chair.

'More times than I can count,' she
said, and then asked, 'Do you have any cigarettes? I've finished mine, and the
cop out there won't open the door.'

Brunetti stepped over to the door and
tapped on it three times. When Gravini opened it, Brunetti asked him if he had
some cigarettes, then took the pack the officer handed him and brought it back
to Mara.

Thank you,' she said, pulled a
plastic lighter from the pocket of her skirt and lit one. 'My mother died of
these,' she said, holding it up and waving it back and forth in front of her,
studying the trail of smoke it left. ‘I wanted to put that on her death
certificate, but the doctors wouldn't do it. They put "cancer", but
it should have been "Marlboro".
¹
She begged me never to
start smoking, and I promised her I never would.'

'Did she find out that you smoked?'

Mara shook her head. 'No, she never
found out, not about the cigarettes and not about a lot of things.'

'Like what?' Brunetti asked.

'Like I was pregnant when she died.
Only four months, but it was the first time and I was young, so it didn't
show.'

'She might have been happy to know,'
suggested Brunetti. 'Especially if she knew she was dying.'

‘I was fifteen,' Mara said.

'Oh,' Brunetti said and looked away.
'Did you have others?'

'Other what?’ she asked, confused.

'Other children.
You
said
it
was
the
first.’

'No, I meant it was the first time I
was pregnant. I had the baby, but then I had a miscarriage with the second and
since men I've been careful.'

'Where is your child?'

'In Brazil, with my mother's sister.'

'Is it a boy or a girl?'

'A girl.'

'How old is she now?'

'Six.' She smiled at the thought of
the child. She looked down at her feet and men up at Brunetti, began to speak,
stopped, and said, 'I have a picture of her if you'd like to see it.'

'Yes, I would,' he said, pulling his
chair closer.

She tossed the cigarette on to the
floor and reached into her blouse to pull out a gold-plated locket the size of
a 100-lire coin. Pressing a tab on the top, she sprang it open and held it out
to Brunetti, who bent forward to examine it. On one side, he saw a round-faced
baby swaddled to within an inch of its life and on the other a little girl with
long dark braids, standing stiff and formal, wearing what looked like a school
uniform. ‘She goes to school with the sisters,' Mara explained, bending her
head down awkwardly to look at the photo. 'I think it's better for them.'