CB19 A Question of Belief (2010) (29 page)

‘Of course, of course,’ Brunetti said neutrally, surprising her, perhaps, by the fact that her last words had not caused him to fall off his chair and crawl towards the door. ‘You said, Signora, that you and your husband had no familiarity with the dead man.’

‘That is correct,’ she said primly, folding her hands on her knees to enforce the words.

‘Then how can it be,’ he began, deciding to take a stab, ‘that traces of both Signor Fontana and your husband were found in the same place in the courtyard?’

Had he really stabbed her, Brunetti could have caused no greater shock. Her mouth opened, and she raised a hand to cover it. She stared at him as if seeing him for the first time and not liking what she saw. But in an instant she had gained control and wiped away all sign of surprise.

‘I’ve no idea how that could be possible, Commissario.’ She devoted some moments to this mystery and then
volunteered, ‘Of course, my husband might have met Signor Fontana in the courtyard and not thought it important enough to mention it to me. Helped him move something, perhaps.’

It was not in Brunetti’s experience that bank directors aided with the moving of heavy objects, but he let her remark pass with a pleasant nod suggestive of belief.

‘And your husband didn’t leave the apartment without you that evening, Signora? Perhaps to get some fresh air? Or to get some wine from your storeroom?’

She sat up straighter and said, voice tight, ‘Are you suggesting that my husband had something to do with that man’s death?’

‘Of course not, Signora,’ Brunetti – who was suggesting exactly that – said calmly. ‘But he might have seen something unusual or something out of place, and mentioned it to you and then perhaps forgot about it himself: memory is a very strange thing.’ He watched this idea work its way into her mind.

She looked at one of the paintings on the far wall, studied it long enough to memorize its strict horizontality, and then looked back at him. She pressed her lips together and looked down, then up at him with a look of embarrassed surprise, ‘There was one thing . . .’

‘Yes, Signora?’

‘The sweater,’ she said, as though she expected Brunetti to understand what she was talking about.

‘Which sweater, Signora?’ he asked.

‘Ah,’ she said, as if suddenly coming back to the room and recalling the circumstances of the conversation. ‘Of course. The light green sweater. It was a Jaeger he bought years ago, a V-neck. He bought it when we were in London on vacation. And he had the habit of putting it over his shoulders whenever we went out for a walk.’ Then, before Brunetti could ask, ‘Yes, even in this heat.’ Her voice grown suddenly softer, she
went on, ‘It had become a sort of talisman for him, well, for both of us when we went out in the evening.’

‘And what happened with the sweater, Signora?’

‘When we got back here that night, my husband realized it wasn’t over his shoulders.’ She crossed her arms and put her hands on her own shoulders and found no sweater there. ‘So he went downstairs immediately to look for it. There hadn’t been many people on the street, so if it had fallen off, he thought it might still be wherever he dropped it.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘Did he find it?’

‘Yes. Yes. When he came back, he said it was on the ground just at the foot of Ponte Santa Caterina. Almost at the Gesuiti.’

‘So he retraced the route of your walk, Signora?’ Brunetti asked, after calculating the distance between their home and the bridge.

‘He must have. I was in bed by then, so all I asked was whether he had found the sweater, and when he told me he had, I’m afraid I went right to sleep.’

‘I see, I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘It’s surprising he said nothing about this in the statement he gave to Lieutenant Scarpa.’

‘As you said, Commissario, memory is a strange thing.’ Then, before he could say it, she continued, ‘It’s strange, as well, that I didn’t remember this until now.’ As if to emphasize just how odd all of this really was, she put a hand to her forehead and gave him a vague look.

‘How long do you think he was gone, Signora?’ Brunetti asked.

She did that familiar Venetian thing of gazing off while memory walked the distance. ‘It would take about fifteen minutes to get to the bridge, I suppose, because he would have been walking slowly. So twice that,’ she said, then, as if uncertain that he could work out the maths unaided, she supplied the sum: ‘Half an hour at most.’

‘Thank you, Signora,’ Brunetti said and got to his feet.

By the time Brunetti got to Signor Fulgoni’s bank, his jacket was plastered to his back, and his trousers bunched together uncomfortably between his legs at every step. He stepped into the air-conditioned foyer and paused to wipe his face and neck with his handkerchief. Luckily, the created temperature was mild, rather than arctic, and Brunetti soon adjusted to it. He crossed the marble-floored lobby and approached a desk behind which sat a crisp-suited young woman. She glanced up and must have seen a dishevelled man in a wrinkled blue jacket, for she asked with badly disguised disdain, ‘May I help you, Signore?’ She spoke in Italian but with an undisguised Veneto cadence.

Brunetti took out his wallet and showed his warrant card. ‘I’d like to speak to Signor Fulgoni,’ he said, careful to speak Veneziano. Then, imitating the thick accent of the friends with whom his father had played cards in the
osterie
of Brunetti’s youth, he added, ‘I want to talk to him about a murder.’

The young woman got to her feet with a speed that, had there been no air conditioning, would have brought sweat to her brow. She looked at Brunetti, off to the left, and then picked up the phone and dialled a number.

‘There’s someone here who would like to speak to Dottor Fulgoni,’ she said; then, after listening for a moment, added, ‘He’s a policeman.’ She looked at Brunetti with a placating smile, said ‘
Sì
,’ said it again, and set down the phone.

‘I’ll take you there,’ she said, careful not to get too close to Brunetti. She turned and started to walk towards the back of the bank.

Brunetti had once read an article in a publication he could no longer recall that discussed the location of the various rooms in a house in terms of atavistic memories of danger. The rooms where people were at their weakest were invariably placed – or so the article maintained – farthest from the point of entry, the place where danger would burst
into the house. Thus bedrooms were on the second floor or at the back of the house, forcing the invader, it was suggested, to fight his way through less well-defended positions with his sword or club, thus alerting the owner and giving ample time to prepare for escape or defence.

Brunetti had no doubt that Signora Fulgoni would have phoned her husband by now, perhaps hoping to give him enough time to slip out a back window or to start sharpening his axe.

Two desks stood on either side of a door at the back of the bank, as though they were bookends and the door some rare piece of incunabula. Another young woman stood in front of one desk; the other was empty.

The first woman stopped and said, raising a hand in Brunetti’s direction, ‘This is the policeman.’

Brunetti fought down the impulse to growl and wave his hands in their faces, but then he remembered that, in the land where money was god, policemen were not meant to enter the places of worship. Instead, he smiled amiably at the second young woman, who turned and opened the central door without bothering to knock. There was to be no surprising Dottor Fulgoni.

The man was already moving towards Brunetti. He was dressed in a sober dark grey suit. His tie was maroon, with some sort of fine pattern on it, and he had a maroon handkerchief in his breast pocket. As the man approached, Brunetti hunted for the signs of femininity he had noticed at the funeral and, seeking, found none.

His steps were precise, his hair and features well cut, and his eyebrows pointed arches over his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Commissario; they didn’t give me your name,’ Fulgoni said in a voice that was reassuringly deep. He shook Brunetti’s hand and led him to a sofa that sat on one side of the office.

Brunetti introduced himself as they crossed the room and chose to seat himself in the leather chair that stood in front of
the sofa; Fulgoni took the sofa. He had sharply-defined cheekbones and a long nose. ‘May I offer you something, Commissario?’ Fulgoni asked. He had an attractive voice, very musical, and he spoke Italian from which had been erased all sign of Veneto accent or cadence.

‘Thank you, Dottore,’ Brunetti said. ‘Perhaps later.’

Fulgoni smiled and thanked the young woman, who left the office.

‘My wife called me and told me about your visit,’ Fulgoni said. ‘She said there was some confusion about the time we got back to our home the night Signor Fontana was killed.’

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, ‘among other things.’

Fulgoni did not pretend to be surprised by this. ‘I assume my wife has clarified the time we got home.’

‘Yes, and she told me about your sweater, and your going out to look for it,’ Brunetti said.

Fulgoni did not respond but sat quietly, studying Brunetti’s face while allowing his own to be studied. Finally he said, ‘Ah, yes. The sweater.’ The way Fulgoni pronounced that last word told Brunetti that it had enormous significance for him, but Brunetti had no idea what the significance might be.

‘She said you realized, when you got back from your walk, that you had lost a green sweater. She said the sweater was important to you – I think “talisman” was the word she used – so you went back outside to look for it.’

‘Did she tell you that I found it?’

‘Yes, and that you told her you had when you came back.’

‘And then?’

‘And then, she said, she went to sleep.’

‘Did she tell you, by any chance, how long I was out? Looking for the sweater?’

‘She wasn’t sure, but she said it was about half an hour.’

‘I see,’ Fulgoni said. He pushed himself back in the sofa, sitting up a bit higher. He met Brunetti’s gaze for a moment
but then glanced away and fixed his eyes on the far wall. Brunetti did not interrupt his reflections.

A minute passed before Fulgoni said, ‘My wife told me that you – the police – have found traces of me and Signor Fontana in the courtyard. In the same place in the courtyard, to be exact.’

‘That’s true.’

‘What traces?’ he asked, cleared his throat, and then added, ‘And where?’

Trapped in his own lie, Brunetti waited some time before answering the question. Fulgoni glanced at him but then looked away, and Brunetti decided to risk saying, ‘I think you know the answers to both those questions, Dottore.’

Only a man with the habit of honesty or one sufficiently ingenuous to be deceived by Brunetti’s air of certainty would have found that a satisfactory answer to his questions.

‘Ah,’ escaped Fulgoni’s lips in a single long breath, the sort of noise a swimmer makes when hauling himself out of the pool at the far end, race over. ‘Would you tell me again what my wife said?’ he asked in a voice he struggled to keep calm.

‘That you went out for a walk with her to escape the heat in your apartment, and that when you came back, you realized you had dropped your sweater, and that you then went out for about half an hour and came back with it.’

‘I see,’ Fulgoni said. Looking directly at Brunetti, he asked, ‘And do you think this would have been enough time for me to go downstairs and kill Fontana? To have beaten his head in against that statue?’

With no hesitation, Brunetti said, ‘Yes,’ and added, ‘There would have been time enough.’

‘But that doesn’t mean I did it?’ Fulgoni asked.

‘Until there is a motive, your killing him would make no sense,’ Brunetti answered.

‘Of course,’ Fulgoni said, ‘and how – what’s the English word, “sporting?” of you to tell me.’

Brunetti was more surprised by the sentiment than by Fulgoni’s use of the word.

‘Would those samples you say you’ve found supply a motive?’ Fulgoni asked.

‘Yes, they would,’ Brunetti answered, intensely conscious of Fulgoni’s phrasing: ‘you say you’ve found’.

Fulgoni startled Brunetti by getting suddenly to his feet. ‘I think I don’t want to be in the bank any more, Commissario.’

Brunetti rose but remained silent.

‘Why don’t we go to my home and have a look, then?’ Fulgoni suggested.

‘If you think that will help things,’ Brunetti said, though he had no idea, not really, of what he meant by that.

Fulgoni reached for his phone and asked that a taxi be called for him.

The two men stood side by side on the deck, not speaking, as the taxi carried them up the Grand Canal and under the Rialto. The day was sun-bright, but the breeze on the water kept them from feeling the heat. In Brunetti’s experience, tension drove most people to talk, and the tension that filled Fulgoni was easily read in the white of his knuckles as he grasped the taxi’s railing. But anger just as often kept them silent as they used their energy to run over the past, perhaps seeking the place or time where things went wrong or flew out of control.

The taxi pulled up at the same place Foa had used the day the body was discovered. Fulgoni paid the driver and added a generous tip, then stepped on to the embankment. He turned to see if Brunetti needed a hand, but he was already beside him.