Drawing Conclusions (22 page)

He mulled over these things while starting on his way back to the Questura, but then, as if emerging from a dream, he suddenly noticed how much light had departed the day. He glanced at his watch and was astonished to see that it was almost five. He judged it foolish to return to the Questura but did not change the direction of his steps, seeing himself from above as he plodded along like an animal on its way back to the barn. At the Questura, he went to Signorina Elettra’s office and found her at her desk, reading what appeared to be the same book he had noticed the last time. She looked up when she heard him come in and casually closed it and slid it aside. ‘You have the look of someone who has brought more work,’ she said, smiling.

‘I just spoke to the leader of Alba Libera,’ he said.

‘Ah, Maddalena. What did you think of her?’ she asked with complete neutrality, offering no clue to what her own opinion might be.

‘That she likes helping people,’ Brunetti answered with equal neutrality.

‘That certainly seems a worthy desire,’ Signorina Elettra allowed.

Brunetti wondered when one of them would give in and express an opinion.

‘She reminds me a bit of those women in nineteenth-century novels, interested in the moral improvement of their inferiors,’ she said.

For a moment, Brunetti weighed the possibility that more than a decade’s exposure to his view of the world had affected hers, but then he realized how self-flattering this was: Signorina Elettra surely had her own ample reserves of scepticism.

Suddenly impatient with sparring, he said, ‘One of the women she helped was staying with Signora Altavilla up until the evening before her death, but it turns out this woman has stayed in other houses, in similar circumstances …’

‘And has made off with the silver?’ Signorina Elettra joked.

‘Something like that.’ He watched her surprise register and liked the fact that she was surprised.

‘Her name?’ she enquired.

‘Gabriela Pavon, though I very much doubt it’s her real name. And the man from whom she was supposedly hiding is Nico Martucci, a Sicilian. That probably is his real name. Lives in Treviso.’ When she began to write down the names, Brunetti said, ‘Don’t bother. I’ve got a friend in Treviso who can tell me. It’ll save time.’

He turned to leave but she said, pointing to some papers on her desk, ‘I’ve found out a few things about Signora Sartori and the man she lived with.’

‘So they aren’t married?’ he asked.

‘Not in the records of the nursing home. Her entire pension goes directly to them, and her companion Morandi pays the rest.’ Then, seeing his surprise, she added, ‘He wouldn’t have to pay, since they’re not married. But he does.’ Brunetti thought of
the red-faced man he had met in Signora Sartori’s room.

‘What does it cost?’ Brunetti asked, thinking of what he and his brother had had to pay for their mother for all those years.

‘Two thousand, four hundred a month,’ then, when he raised his eyebrows, she said, ‘It’s one of the best in the city.’ She raised a hand and let it fall. ‘And those are the prices.’

‘How much is her pension?’ he asked.

‘Six hundred euros. She left four years early, so she isn’t eligible for the whole pension.’

Before he tried the maths, Brunetti asked, ‘And his?’

‘Five hundred and twenty.’ Together, their pensions covered barely half of the cost.

The man had not seemed wealthy; nor, Brunetti had to admit, had she. If he was what he seemed, a pensioner in need of paying utilities, rent, and food, where did he find the money for the nursing home?

She picked up the papers and handed them to him; he was surprised to find more than a few sheets. What could two old people like that have done in their lives?

‘What’s in here?’ he asked, holding it up with deliberate exaggeration.

With her most sibylline look, Signorina Elettra observed, ‘Their lives have not been without event.’

Brunetti allowed himself to relax into a smile for what seemed the first time that day. He waved the papers, saying, ‘I’ll have a look.’ She nodded and turned her attention to her computer.

In his office, he first dialled his home number.

Paola answered with a ‘
Sì
’ so devoid of patience as to discourage even the most hardened telephone salesman or to frighten her children into hurrying home to clean their rooms.

‘“And the voice of the turtle dove is heard in our land,”’ he could not stop himself from saying.

‘Guido Brunetti,’ she said, voice no more friendly than it had been with that impersonal ‘
Sì
’, ‘don’t you start quoting the Bible at me.’

‘I read the Song of Songs as literature, not as a sacred text.’

‘And you use it as a provocation,’ she said.

‘Merely following in the tradition of two thousand years of Christian apologists.’

‘You are a wicked, annoying man,’ she said in a lighter
voice, and he knew the danger was past.

‘I am a wicked, annoying man who would like to take you to dinner.’

‘And lose out on
turbanti di soglie
, eaten in peace at your own table, in the midst of the joyous harmony of your family?’ she asked, leaving him uncertain whether the thought of his presence or of the meal had changed her mood.

‘I’ll try to be on time.’

‘Good,’ she said, and he thought she was about to hang up, but she added, ‘I’m glad you’ll be here.’ Then she was gone, and Brunetti was left feeling as though the temperature of the room had just risen or the light had somehow increased. More than twenty years, and she could still do this to him, he thought; he shook his head, hunted for the number of his friend in Treviso, and called.

As he had suspected, the woman’s name was not Gabriela Pavon: the Treviso police could give him six aliases used by the woman whose fingerprints were all over the apartment she had shared with her companion, but they could not supply him with her real name. The Sicilian – Brunetti told himself he had to stop calling him that and, more importantly, thinking of him as that – taught chemistry in a technical school, had no criminal record, and was, at least according to the police there, the victim of a crime. There was no trace of the woman, and his friend was resigned enough to suspect that there would be none until she committed the same crime again in some other part of the country.

Brunetti told him what the woman was probably planning to do in Venice and was asked by his weary friend to send a report, ‘not that it’s going to make any difference. She didn’t commit a crime.’

When he hung up, Brunetti turned his attention to the papers Signorina Elettra had given him. Signora Maria Sartori had been born in Venice eighty years ago; Benito Morandi, eighty-three. The man’s first name struck Brunetti: well he understood what sort of family would name their son Benito in those years. But the sight of the two names joined together prodded Brunetti’s memory, as if Ginger had suddenly rediscovered her Fred. Or Bonnie her Clyde. He looked away from the papers, focusing his memory and not his eyes, and followed the meandering stream of recollection. Something about an old person, but not one of them; some other old person, and when they were not old. It was a memory from his life before work, before Paola and all that came from knowing her. His mother would remember, he caught himself thinking, his mother as she had once been.

He dialled Vianello’s
telefonino
number. When the Inspector answered, Brunetti asked, ‘You downstairs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come up for a minute, would you?’

‘I’m on my way.’

Staring helped. Brunetti went to the window, looked across the canal, letting the names rumble around in his mind, hoping that putting them together and then separating them would nudge his memory.

Vianello found him like that, hands clasped behind his back, deep in contemplation of either the façade of the church or the three-storey house for vagrant cats that had been built in front of the façade.

Rather than speak, Vianello sat in one of the chairs in front of his superior’s desk. And waited.

Without turning, Brunetti said, ‘Maria Sartori and Benito Morandi.’

There was silence from Vianello, the sound of his heels sliding across the floor as he stretched his legs. More time passed, and then came the long sigh of dawning memory. ‘Madame Reynard,’ he said and permitted himself a smile at having got there first.

Any Venetian, at least one their age, would have remembered sooner or later. Now that Vianello had given him the name, Brunetti also had the memory. Madame Marie Reynard, already a legendary beauty, had come to Venice with her husband almost – could it be? – a century before. They had had five years or so before he died a spectacular death. Brunetti couldn’t recall the means: car, boat, aeroplane. The totality of her grief had cost her their unborn child, and upon her recovery she had lapsed into widowhood and seclusion in their
palazzo
on the Canal Grande.

He no longer knew when he had first heard the story, but even before Brunetti reached middle school, Madame Reynard had become legend, as is the destiny of mourning spouses, at least if they are both beautiful and rich. The mysterious French woman never left her
palazzo
, or she left it at night to walk the streets in silent tears, or she allowed only priests to enter, with whom, draped in her widow’s veil, she recited endless rosaries for the repose of her husband’s soul. Or she was a recluse, crucified by grief. Two elements remained constant in all variants: she was beautiful and she was rich.

And then, more than twenty years ago, aged one hundred, widowed for three-quarters of a century, she died. And her lawyer – who had nowhere appeared in any of the legends – turned out to have inherited the
palazzo
and all it contained, as well as the lands, the investments, and the patent to a process that did something to the strength of cotton fibres, making them resistant to higher temperatures. Whatever it did – and the cloth changed from cotton to silk to wool, depending on the version told – the patent ended up being immeasurably more valuable than the
palazzo
or the rest.

‘Of course, of course,’ Brunetti said as the tiny figures in his memory moved together and Maria found her Benito: for those were the names of the witnesses to Madame Reynard’s will – Sartori and Morandi – and as such the subject of gossip and speculation that had occupied the city for months. They had worked in the hospital, had no previous knowledge of the dying woman, were certainly not named as beneficiaries of the will, and
so were judged to be extraneous to the matter. Brunetti went back to his desk.

‘Weren’t there some French relatives?’ Vianello asked.

Brunetti rummaged through the stories that had been dislodged in his memory and came up with the one he sought: ‘They turned out not to be relatives but people who had read about her fortune and thought they’d have a try at it.’ He let more information seep in and then added, ‘But yes, they were French.’

Both sat for a while, letting their memories gather up bits and pieces. ‘And wasn’t there an auction?’ Vianello asked.

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said. ‘One of the last great ones. After she died. They sold everything.’ Then, because it was Vianello he was talking to, and he could say such things to him, Brunetti added, ‘My father-in-law said every collector in the city was there. Every collector in the Veneto, for that matter.’ Brunetti knew of two drawings from that auction. ‘He got two pages from a notebook of Giovannino de Grassi.’

Vianello shook his head in ignorance.

‘Fourteenth century. There’s a whole notebook in Bergamo, with drawings – paintings, really – of birds and animals, and a fantasy alphabet.’ His father-in-law kept his two drawings in a folder, out of the light. Brunetti held up his hands about twenty centimetres apart. ‘These are only loose pages, about this big. Beautiful.’

‘Valuable?’ asked the far more pragmatic Vianello.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ Brunetti said. ‘But I’d guess so. In fact, my father-in-law said that most collectors went because of her husband’s collection of drawings – it wasn’t like today, when you could check everything that was in the auction by going online. He said there were always surprises. But this time, the surprise was that there were so few drawings. Still he managed to get those two.’

‘Pity about Cuccetti, isn’t it?’ Vianello asked, surprising Brunetti by remembering the name of the lawyer who had swept the board.

‘What, that he died so soon after? What was it, two years?’

‘I think so. And with his son. The son was driving, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, and drunk. But it was all hushed up.’ Both of them knew a fair bit about this sort of thing. ‘Cuccetti had a lot of important friends,’ Brunetti added.

As if Brunetti’s statement were the night, and his question the day, Vianello asked, ‘The will was never contested, was it?’

‘Only by those French people, and that didn’t last a day.’ Leaning across his desk Brunetti retrieved the papers Signorina Elettra had given him and said, ‘This is what she found.’ He read the first sheet and passed it to Vianello. In amiable silence, neither thinking it necessary to comment, they read through the papers.

Maria Sartori had been a practical nurse, first at the Ospedale al Lido, and then at the Ospedale Civile, from which she had retired more than fifteen years before. Never married, she had lived at the same address as Benito Morandi for most of their adult lives. She had kept an account at the same bank during her working life, into which modest sums were deposited and then withdrawn. She had never been in hospital, nor had she ever come to the attention of the police. And that was all: no mention of joy or sorrow, dreams or disappointments. Decades of work, retirement and a pension, and now a room in a private
casa di cura
, paid for by her pension and the contribution of her companion.

Attached was a photocopy of her
carta d’identità
; Brunetti barely recognized the soft-featured woman who gazed out at the world from the photo: surely she could not be the ancestor of the woman with the deeply lined face he had seen. He fought off the temptation to whisper to the younger face how right she had been: trouble comes.