Falling in Love (18 page)

‘I imagine an enormous family once lived there,’ she said, continuing around it until they reached the small
campo
at the foot of the bridge. She looked across the canal at the
palazzi
that lined the other side and said, ‘And families lived there, as well.’

When it was clear that she had nothing else to say, Brunetti started towards the bridge and began to climb the steps, hoping to be able to walk away from the irritation that her words had created in him.

From behind him, he heard her footsteps. And then she was beside him, walking on his right, near the railing. He shifted the cloth bag to his other shoulder, hearing the paper crinkle inside.

‘Don’t you have anything to say?’ she asked.

‘Nothing I say will change anything. Hamburg isn’t Hamburg any more, and Parisians whine about the changes to their city, but everyone and his dog thinks it’s his right to moan about the changes here. I’m just keeping out of it.’

‘Flavia,’ a man’s voice called from above them, and Brunetti, distracted, stepped in front of her and blocked her ascent, causing her to crash into his back. Both of them danced about to keep their footing on the steps, while Brunetti looked up to see whose voice it was.

And saw Freddy, Marchese d’Istria, dressed in a pair of light blue jeans, white shirt, and dark blue jacket, looking years younger than his real age, just starting to walk down the steps in their direction. As always, Freddy broadcast good health and calm. Brunetti noticed that the buttons of the jacket were pulled tight, but no one could think of accusing Freddy of being fat: he was merely ‘
robusto
’, another sure sign of his continued good health.

Brunetti stepped to the left, and Flavia took her hand away from the railing and walked up to the landing between ramps. Freddy bent and kissed her on both cheeks, then turned to Brunetti and, pretending he had not seen his instinctive protective move, embraced him warmly. ‘How wonderful to see you, Guido: it’s seldom I get to see two of my favourite people at the same time.’ He indicated the Church of the Salute with one arm, placed the other protectively across Flavia’s shoulders. ‘And in such a wonderful place.’ Then, as an afterthought, he added in a serious voice, ‘I’d like the circumstances to be different, though.’

With eel-like grace, Flavia freed herself and turned to Brunetti. ‘Thanks for taking me this far, Guido. Now Freddy gets to do the other half. Soon they’ll be moving me around the city on rollers, someone new taking over at every bridge, I suppose.’ It was meant to be light-hearted, but Brunetti chose to hear a different tone, and a far more sober one.

Freddy asked how the performance had gone, and Flavia made some critical remarks about the conductor, both of them striving to make this sound like a normal conversation. Brunetti was careful to turn his head towards them every so often as they walked, three abreast, down the steps, but his attention was concentrated on the other people crossing the bridge, both those going down with them and those coming up towards them. At this time of night there were few, and most were couples or groups. A man with a Jack Russell came towards them, the unleashed dog dashing to the top of the bridge, only to turn around instantly and scamper back to his approaching master. A tall woman with a scarf wrapped high around her neck talked on her
telefonino
as she passed them, going down more quickly than they, but she paid them no attention at all. Brunetti noticed the toes-out angle of her feet and the care she took in placing them, favouring one, a wise precaution on these humid steps.

When they reached the last landing of the bridge, Brunetti stopped. He decided it would be best to let them go, they to the left and he to the right, without asking Freddy if they could talk the next day. Flavia was sufficiently upset; he did not want to give her the chance to believe that they were going to meet to talk about her. He gave Flavia twin kisses, shook Freddy’s hand and said goodnight, then started down the final ramp of steps and towards home. Just as he got to the small
campo
in front of the museum, he turned and saw that they had disappeared. He walked back to the corner; ahead of him, they were just turning left into the
calle
that would take them over the bridge and down into San Vio. Feeling entirely foolish, Brunetti walked quickly to where they had turned, then stopped and watched them until they reached the bridge. He set off after them, embarrassed that they were the only three people on the street and with no idea of what he was doing.

At the bridge into San Vio, some animal instinct told him to look to the right, and he saw a figure, really half a figure, standing at the point where a
calle
opened on to the
riva
. He saw a coat, perhaps a raincoat, perhaps a scarf. Brunetti’s step faltered and he came down heavily on his left foot. The bag started to slip from his shoulder, and he turned to put a hand on it. When he looked again, the figure was no longer there, the only trace of it the sound of diminishing footsteps. He ran to the entrance to the
calle
, but by the time he got there, the entire length of it was empty, and though he could still hear the footsteps, there was no way he could tell the direction from which they came. He ran to the first crossing: no one to the right and no one to the left. And off in the distance, those ever-fainter footsteps. He stopped and held his breath, but he could still not tell where they were going, whether towards the Salute or towards the Accademia. The sound died away. Brunetti turned around and started towards home.

18

Paola had abandoned all hope of Brunetti’s coming home, and so Brunetti, having seen that no one was up and waiting for him, went into the kitchen in search of something to eat and drink but quickly decided he wanted nothing but to be in his bed, alongside his wife. But first he had to find a place for the green cloth bag. He gave this some thought before good sense intervened and reminded him that the place would hold the bag for no more than eight hours, so he left it on the top of their dresser and went into the bathroom.

His arrival beside his wife was greeted with a grunt, which he chose to read as an affectionate one, and he was soon lost in images of disappearing scarves and footsteps, and yellow roses in rising, suffocating piles.

The following morning, he gave Paola a brief account of his meeting with Flavia the previous night, but she was more interested in the emerald necklace and asked to see it. She had chastised his pedestrian comparison of the stones to Fisherman’s Friend lozenges and insisted that they must be the size of ‘plovers’ eggs’, explaining that she had read the phrase many times but had no idea of how big they were.

‘We can’t touch it until they’ve taken the prints, all right?’ he asked, not ready, after only one coffee, to enter into a discussion of how large a plover’s egg might be. Indeed, he was in some doubt as to what a plover might look like and thus could make no accurate calculation as to the size of its eggs.

He left the apartment carrying the bag and was careful to keep it over his shoulder when he stopped for coffee and a brioche. At the Questura, he went immediately to the lab to speak to Bocchese. The chief technician’s perpetual air of self-sufficiency often provoked Brunetti to acts of needless bravado: this time he walked to Bocchese’s desk, the bag in his hand, and, saying nothing, tilted it and let the package slide on to the desk. As luck would have it, the paper wrapping caught in one of the straps of the bag so the necklace materialized on the desk bedded on the royal blue wrapping paper.

‘For me?’ Bocchese asked, looking up at Brunetti and pasting a smile of idiot delight on his face. ‘How did you know today’s my birthday, Guido? Well, never mind that: thanks for remembering, and I think I’ll wear it with my red dress.’ He spread the fingers of his right hand and wiggled them over the necklace, as if about to pick it up, but Brunetti refused to play his game and stepped back to let him touch what he willed.

Bocchese accepted partial victory and pulled his hand back. He opened the front drawer of his desk and poked around in it until he found a jeweller’s loupe. He put it to his eye and bent over the necklace, careful to avoid coming into contact with it or the paper on which it rested. He studied the stones for a moment, then moved to the other side of his desk, forcing Brunetti aside, to look at them from another angle. He moved over each one, humming a little song that Brunetti had heard from him only in moments of great contentment.

Bocchese set the loupe on his desk and went back to his chair. ‘
Maria Vergine.
You certainly do have good taste in stones, Guido. In a setting like this, they’re probably genuine, and if they are, they’re worth . . . a great deal.’

‘Probably?’ Brunetti asked.

Bocchese pushed out his lips as though about to kiss a baby as he considered Brunetti’s question. ‘It’s almost impossible to tell with the ones that are coming out of South America today.’ He shook his head in disapproval of forgery he could not detect.

‘But if the setting is as old as I think it is,’ the technician went on, ‘at least thirty years, and hasn’t been messed with, then they’re priceless.’

‘I’ve always wondered what that word means, especially when it’s used in reference to things that people are buying and selling,’ Brunetti said, adding, ‘for a price.’

‘That’s true, isn’t it?’ Bocchese exclaimed with pleasure. ‘I wonder why we continue to say it?’

‘How much is the price they’re beyond?’ Brunetti asked.

Bocchese sat back and folded his arms, studying the stones. ‘What I usually do is show them to a friend of mine who’s a jeweller – he really knows stones – and ask him what he thinks they’re worth.’

‘Who’s that?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Vallotto.’

Making no attempt to disguise his shock, Brunetti said, ‘But he’s a thief.’

‘No, Guido,’ Bocchese began, ‘he’s far worse than a thief. He’s a cheat and a swindler, but he’s very convincing, so after you deal with him, you can’t say that he’s robbed you because you’ve signed a form saying you agree to his prices, and that means there’s no way you can stop him.’

‘He buys as well as sells, doesn’t he?’ Brunetti asked, thinking of the man’s slick shop not far from Rialto.

‘Yes, and my guess is that he’s not satisfied unless he can sell what he’s bought for five times what he paid.’

‘But you trust him?’

Bocchese looked at a small Renaissance bronze plaque he kept on his desk as a paperweight or good luck token. He prodded it with his forefinger, moving it a few centimetres to the left. ‘I did him a favour once, so though we’re not friends, he’ll still help me; well, he’ll still give me an accurate estimation.’

‘Even though he knows you work for the police?’

‘Who could pay him to do it, you mean?’ Bocchese asked.

‘No, not that. Who might come to arrest him some day.’

Bocchese pushed the plaque back to where it had been. ‘He thinks it was a big favour.’

‘What did you do?’ Brunetti asked, sensing that the technician, usually a man wrapped in privacy, wanted him to ask.

Bocchese looked at the plaque again, as if the two human figures on it had also expressed interest in the story. ‘We were at school together. This is forty years ago; more. His family was miserable; the father drank and had been arrested a few times. The mother made do with what she could earn. But the kids went to school clean and studied hard.’ Brunetti had heard this story countless times: it was the youth of his friends and companions.

‘Anyway,’ Bocchese said, as if in response to a signal from the men on the plaque that he hurry things up, ‘one day I was in a grocery store getting some things for my mother and I saw his mother, standing in one of the aisles, looking around her as if the fires of Hell were coming to get her. She saw me, but she didn’t answer when I said hello. Then all of a sudden the owner was there, screaming at her, “I saw you, I saw you take that rice”, and it was then I saw her hand was under her coat.

‘She looked like she was going to faint, poor thing, and then he was walking towards her, screaming, “Thief, thief, thief. Someone call the police.”

‘And I thought of Leonardo and the other kids, and what it would be like for them if their mother was arrested, too.’

‘So what did you do?’ Brunetti asked.

‘While the man was walking towards her, I went past her, to where he was, and reached up and grabbed a box of pasta, and I made sure I knocked some others off, so he’d look to see what was going on. When he saw me, he made a grab at me, but I ran around him and out of the store, and he forgot all about her and followed me. I moved just slowly enough that he would try to catch me, and when I’d led him two streets from the store, I really started to run and lost him.’

Bocchese looked back at the memory without smiling. ‘When he got back to the store, she was gone. I don’t know if he recognized her; he didn’t know me, that’s for sure.’

‘How’d Vallotto find out?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I suppose his mother told him,’ Bocchese said without much interest. ‘He never talked about it until years later, when I met him on the street, and he told me he’d heard I was getting married, and to come to him for the rings.