CB19 A Question of Belief (2010) (30 page)

Still not speaking, they walked down the embankment and over the bridge. They stopped at the
portone
and Brunetti waited while Fulgoni pulled out his keys and opened the door.

Fulgoni led the way to the storeroom that held the
birdcages and drew up sharp in front of the padlocked chain. ‘I assume it’s there that you found your samples?’ he asked, pointing inside.

Brunetti had thought to get the keys from the evidence room and pulled them from his pocket. He fitted the various keys in the lock until he found the right one, removed the lock and opened the door. It was almost noon, so the sun beat down squarely upon them and cast no light into the storeroom. Fulgoni reached inside and switched on the light.

Ignoring the birdcages, he walked straight to the boxes piled beside them. Brunetti watched as he read the labels, though his body blocked Brunetti from reading them. At last he reached up and slid one out, creating a small avalanche as the boxes above it collapsed to fill the space. He placed it on a small round table with a scratched surface that Brunetti had overlooked. Fulgoni picked at the tape, dry and difficult to remove, that sealed the box and pulled it loose in a single long strip. Turning to Brunetti, he said, ‘Perhaps you’d like to open it, Commissario.’

He moved past Fulgoni and pulled back the first flaps, then the next two. A grey turtleneck sweater lay on the top.

‘I think you have to look deeper, Commissario,’ Fulgoni said and then gave a dry laugh in which there was no humour whatsoever.

Brunetti folded back the sweater; beneath it was a thick blue sweater with a zipper. And beneath that was a light green V-neck sweater. ‘Yes, look at the label,’ Fulgoni said at the same instant Brunetti’s eyes fell upon the Jaeger tag.

Brunetti let the other sweaters fall back into place and closed the flaps of the box. He turned to Fulgoni and said, ‘Does this mean you did not go out in search of your sweater?’

‘This box was packed at the end of winter, Commissario,’ Fulgoni said. ‘So, no, I wasn’t wearing it, and I did not drop it. And so I did not go out in search of it.’ He placed the
sweater carelessly on top of the pile of boxes, then bent to pick up the dry strip of tape from the floor.

Keeping his eyes on the brown tape as he wrapped it around two fingers, he said, ‘My wife doesn’t like mess. Or disorder.’ He slipped the paper cylinder into his pocket, looked at Brunetti and said, ‘I’ve always tried to respect her wishes.’ He nodded towards the birdcages and said, ‘That’s proof that I did, I suppose. We didn’t have children, so one year she decided that she wanted birds. She filled the house with them.’ He waved a magician’s arm over the empty cages. ‘But they died or they grew sick, so we gave them away. Well, the ones that weren’t sick.’

‘And those that were?’ Brunetti asked, as he felt he was being asked to do.

‘My wife disposed of them when they died,’ Fulgoni said. He turned to Brunetti. ‘I’ve always been far more sentimental than my wife, so I wanted to bury them over on the other side of the courtyard, under the palms.’ He made a vague gesture beyond the door of the storeroom. ‘But she put them in plastic bags and had the garbage man take them away.’

‘But you kept the cages?’ Brunetti said.

Fulgoni ran his eye over the stacks of wooden bird houses and said, puzzled by it, ‘Yes, we did, didn’t we? I wonder why that was?’

Brunetti knew this was a question not in search of an answer.

‘Maybe my wife likes cages,’ Fulgoni said with a desolate smile. ‘I’d never thought of it that way.’ He walked over and pulled the grated door of the storeroom towards them until it closed and then stood for a moment with his hands holding two of the upright bars, looking out at the courtyard. Then he turned to face Brunetti and asked, ‘But which side is the cage, do you think, Commissario? In here or out there?’

Brunetti was a man of infinite patience, so simply stood and waited for Fulgoni to speak again. He had seen this
moment many times before and had come to think of it as a kind of unravelling or unhinging, when a person decides that things have to be made clear, if only to himself.

Fulgoni put the tips of the fingers of his right hand on his lips, as if to give evidence of how deep in thought he was. When he removed his fingers, his lips and the area around them were stained a dark brown; Brunetti’s eyes fled to Fulgoni’s hands, but he saw there only the rust from the bars, not Fontana’s blood.

Brunetti closed his eyes, suddenly aware of the heat of this cage in which the two of them were trapped.

‘I’d like to show you something, Commissario,’ Fulgoni said in an entirely normal voice. When Brunetti looked at him, he saw that the banker was wiping his hands with the handkerchief from his jacket pocket. Brunetti was struck by the way his hands grew cleaner without making the handkerchief darker.

Fulgoni moved past Brunetti and returned to where the cages were stacked. He studied them for a moment, then leaned down to examine one on the bottom row. He bent and put his hands on either side of it and started to wiggle it back and forth, working it free from the other cages trapping it.

He yanked it out, and the cages imitated the boxes by collapsing into the space where it had been, landing askew.

Fulgoni carried the cage to the table and set it beside the box. ‘Have a look, Commissario,’ he said, stepping back to remove his shadow, which the light cast across the cage.

Brunetti bent to study it: he saw a wooden birdcage, thin ribs of bamboo, the classic ‘Made in China’ construction. On the bottom, instead of newspaper, lay a piece of red cloth. It seemed to be woven of light cotton, and near the back Brunetti could see a separate piece: could it be a sleeve? Yes, that was it, a sleeve, and there was the collar, right at the back. A sweater then, a red cotton sweater, summer weight. Fulgoni stood beside him, motionless and silent, so Brunetti
returned his attention to the cloth, puzzled that the other man should want him to look at it. Just below the neck there appeared a figure, or at least a change in colour. Darker than the rest of the sweater, it was amorphous: a flower, perhaps? One of those big things like a peony? An anemone?

There, on the top of the sleeve, was another flower, this one smaller and darker. Drier.

Brunetti reached to open the door of the cage but before he could, Fulgoni put a hand on his arm, saying, ‘Don’t touch it, Commissario. I don’t think you want to contaminate the evidence.’ There was no trace of sarcasm in his voice, only concern.

Brunetti looked at the sweater for a long time before he asked, ‘How careful were you when you put it in there?’

‘I picked it up with my handkerchief after she went back upstairs. I didn’t know what would happen, but I wanted there to be some . . .’

‘Some what?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Something that would show what had happened.’

‘Would you tell me what that was?’

Fulgoni moved closer to the door, perhaps in search of cooler air. Both of them were sweating heavily, and the birdcages, since being disturbed by Fulgoni, emanated a foul, dusty odour.

‘Araldo and I had use of one another. I suppose you could say it that way. He seemed to like things to be quick and anonymous, and I had no choice but to settle for that.’ Fulgoni sighed, and in the process must have drawn in some of the air disturbed by the cages, for he started to cough. The force of it bent him forward, and he covered his mouth with his hand, smearing the rust stains further.

When the coughing stopped, he stood upright and continued. ‘We would meet here. Araldo called it,’ he said with conscious melodrama and a wave of his arm at the low ceiling, the dust-tinged beams, ‘our own little love nest.’ He
pulled out his handkerchief and wiped at his face, spreading the rust, but lighter now, across his forehead.’My wife knew, I suppose. My mistake was to think she didn’t care.’

He said nothing more for so long a time that Brunetti asked, ‘And that night?’

‘It was almost as my wife told you, except that it was her sweater that was dropped. A red cotton sweater. I said I’d go out and look for it. It wasn’t as far as Santa Caterina, but just on the other side of the first bridge. When I went out, I saw that the door to Fontana’s mailbox was open: that was the signal we used. If I saw it when my wife and I came home together, I’d make some excuse about going out for a walk, and I’d come downstairs and ring his doorbell from out in the
calle
, so he’d have an excuse to go out. And when he came down, we would retreat to our bower of love.’

‘Is that what happened?’

‘Yes. I put the sweater on the railing of the staircase, where it would be safe. And then Araldo came down. It never took long. Araldo didn’t want to waste time on talk or anything like that. When we were finished, he always went out first: we were careful about that.’

‘But not always?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Signor Marsano, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

Fulgoni shook his head at the memory. ‘We were in the courtyard one time when he opened the door. It’s not that we were doing anything, but it must have been obvious to him.’ Fulgoni shrugged. ‘It was another reason we were careful. After that, I mean.’

‘And that night?’

‘Araldo left first and was crossing the courtyard, when I heard her voice. The light was out in here, so I thought if I just stayed quiet maybe everything would be all right. And then I’d stop. I always wanted to stop,’ he said, voice wistful. ‘But I knew I wouldn’t.’

Fulgoni wiped his face again, and Brunetti was about to suggest they go out into the courtyard when the other man continued. ‘So I stayed in here, trapped, and listened to them argue. I’d never heard her talk like that before, never heard her lose control.’ Fulgoni turned and started to nudge the birdcages into line. As they fell or slipped into place, dust rose from them and he started coughing again.

When the coughing stopped, he went on. ‘Then I heard a noise. Not a voice, but a noise, and then more noises and then a voice, but very short, and then more noises. And then I didn’t hear anything more.’

Fulgoni pointed to the sofa. ‘I was there, lying there with my pants down around my ankles, so it took me time to go and see what had happened.’ Then, in a voice he forced to be stronger, he said, ‘No, that’s not the reason. I was afraid of what I would find.

‘I heard footsteps going up the staircase, but I still waited. When I finally got to the door . . . there,’ he said, pointing to the door that still closed them off from the courtyard, ‘the light was on and I saw him on the ground. But the light’s on a timer and it went out. So I had to walk back to the switch and turn it on again, walking through the dark, knowing he was there, on the ground.’ He stopped for what seemed a long time.

‘When I came back, I saw what she had done. She must have seen the sweater on the railing when she came down, so she knew I was here. And then she saw him coming out, and it was . . .’

‘And the sweater?’

‘It was lying beside him. She must have had it in her hands when she . . .’ For a moment, Fulgoni looked as though he would be sick, but that passed and he went on. ‘I took out my handkerchief. I’d realized how things would look or could look. I didn’t want anything to happen to her.’ Then, like a man discovering honesty, or courage, he added, ‘or to me.’

He took two deep breaths after saying that, then said, ‘So I wrapped my hand in my handkerchief and brought the sweater back in here and put it in the cage. I moved it around to flatten it out a little.’

‘What did you do then, Signore?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I locked up this room and went back upstairs and went to bed.’

Paola, who did not have the legitimacy conferred by the possession of a driver’s licence but who did have the security conferred by a husband who was a commissario of police, drove down to the railway station in Malles to pick Brunetti up, risking not only her own life to do so, but that of their children, as well. They went directly to La Posta in Glorenza, where the children gave evidence of having spent most of the day walking in the mountains by devouring a platter of Speck the size of an inner tube, tagliatelle with fresh
finferli,
and apricot strudel with vanilla cream.

Both Raffi and Chiara were comatose by the time they drove up to the farmhouse and had to be prodded out of the car and into the house, where they disappeared into their rooms, though Chiara did drape her arms around him and mumble something about being happy to see her father.

Later, stretched in front of the open fire, Brunetti sipped at a whisper of Marillen schnapps while Paola disappeared to get them sweaters. When she came back, she put it over his shoulders, but he insisted on standing to pull it on.

‘Tell me,’ she said, sitting down beside him.

He did. His glass remained untouched as he described the events of that morning, the funeral of Signora Montini, attended by himself, Vianello and Doctor Rizzardi, as well as two or three people who had worked with her in the lab.

Paola asked no questions, hoping the momentum of his story would carry him along.

‘They held it at San Polo, though she went to church at the Frari. The pastor there didn’t want to say Mass over her.’ He turned and leaned against the arm of the sofa, the better to see her. ‘It was miserable. We sent flowers, but the rest of the church was bare. The priest looked at his watch twice during the Mass, and he spoke a bit faster after he did.’ And Brunetti, sitting in the church, hot and exhausted from a sleepless night, could not keep his thoughts from returning to the scene, less than two weeks before, when he stood in the
campo
not far from the church, waiting for Vianello’s aunt to emerge from this woman’s house.

He saw the plain coffin, the three wreaths, smelled the incense. ‘But at least it was short,’ he told Paola. ‘Then they took her to San Michele.’

‘And you came up here?’ she asked.

Brunetti hesitated for some time and then said, ‘I did a favour for Vianello first.’

‘What?’

‘I talked to his aunt.’

Paola could not hide her surprise. ‘But I thought she was away for two weeks with her son.’