Falling in Love

by Donna Leon

  The doors to the elevator slid open and they stepped inside. ‘I know. I know. I’m sorry I didn’t call, but the place was filled with fans, and I had to sign programmes and discs for ever.’ Long silence. ‘I know I said I would, but there were so many of them, and it made me so happy to see them there that I forgot about it entirely. I’m sorry, Freddy; really I am.’ Freddy spoke for some time, and she said, ‘I’m just leaving now.’

  The elevator stopped. The doors opened. She stepped into the corridor and turned, waiting for Brunetti to get out; she put her hand on his arm to stop him from continuing towards the exit. ‘There’s no need for you to worry, Freddy. I couldn’t be in safer company. Guido Brunetti – he said he was at school with you – came back after, and I’ve been talking to him.’ More silence. ‘Yes, I told him everything the other night, so he came along after the performance. He’s leaving with me.’ She looked at Brunetti, who nodded.

  ‘No, Freddy, don’t bother. He said he’d walk me home.’ She lowered her face and turned a bit aside. ‘No, really, Freddy, you don’t have to.’ Suddenly, she started to laugh, nothing faked or forced about it.

  ‘Oh, you are a goose. You always were one. All right, at the top of the bridge. But if you’re wearing your pyjamas, I’ll know you were lying.’

  She clicked off the phone and returned it to her pocket. Where did she keep that, he wondered, during a performance? ‘He was worried,’ she said in explanation. ‘But you heard it all. He said he was still up and would meet us on the bridge so you didn’t have to take me all the way home. He was always a worrier, Freddy,’ she added and continued towards the exit.

  They found the watchman sitting inside the portiere’s enclosure, drinking from the metal top of his thermos, a half-eaten sandwich in front of him. ‘Good evening, Signora,’ he said. ‘There were lots of people here tonight, waiting for you.’ With his cup he toasted the empty space just to the side of his booth. ‘But they all went home.’

  Turning to Brunetti, she said, her own surprise audible, ‘I’ve never done that before, just forgotten about them.’ The guard gave Brunetti a closer look and, when Brunetti met his gaze, took a sip from his cup.

  Flavia shrugged. ‘Can’t be undone,’ she muttered, said goodnight to the watchman, and pushed open the door to the calle. Outside, she turned to the right and headed towards Campo San Fantin. He was about to tell her they should have turned left but then thought of the calle he would have led them to, narrow and dark. She turned at the hotel, and Brunetti was happy enough to let her lead the way. There had been no one standing in the calle outside the theatre, though that probably didn’t mean much: she would have to cross the Ponte dell’Accademia to get home. Freddy would meet them there, but that was also the place anyone else who was waiting for her would be.

  Since the city illumination had been changed about a decade ago, Brunetti had grumbled about how bright the night had become: some of his friends complained that they could read in bed with the light that came in the windows. But here, nearing the underpass that would lead them to the narrow calle into Campo Sant’Angelo, Brunetti was relieved at the brightness.

  They emerged into the campo and she asked, ‘Do you often do this?’

  ‘What? Walk women home?’

  ‘No. Stay out after midnight without having to call home.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Paola is just as happy to sit alone and read.’

  ‘Than to have you there?’ she asked, her surprise audible.

  ‘No, she’d rather have me there, and she’ll probably stay up until I get home. But if she’s reading, it doesn’t make much difference who’s around her: she ignores them.’

  ‘Why?’

  It was a question he’d heard a number of times. To serious readers like him and Paola, reading was an activity, not a pastime, and so the presence of another person added nothing to it. The children distracted Brunetti; he envied Paola her ability to disappear into the text, leaving them all behind. But he knew most people saw this as strange, almost inhuman, and so he said, ‘She was raised that way, reading alone, so it’s her habit.’

  ‘Did she grow up there?’ Flavia asked. ‘In the palazzo?’

  ‘Yes, she lived there until her last year of university – that’s when I met her – but then she went away to finish her studies.’

  ‘She didn’t stay here?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’ He wondered what his own children would decide to do, and soon.

  ‘Where did she go?’

  ‘Oxford.’

  ‘In England?’ Flavia asked, stopping to face him.

  ‘Not in Mississippi,’ Brunetti answered, as he often had.

  ‘Excuse me?’ she asked, obviously confused.

  ‘There’s a university in Oxford in Mississippi,’ Brunetti explained.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Flavia said and began walking again. ‘You met her and then she went away. For how long?’

  ‘Only a year and a half.’

  ‘“Only”?’

  ‘The course was meant to last three, but she finished it in half the time.’

  ‘How?’

  Brunetti smiled as he said, ‘I suppose she read very fast.’

  Flavia stopped beside the edicola, closed now, just at the entrance to Campo Santo Stefano. There were few people and all were in motion, he noticed; no one seemed to be standing still, waiting to see who came in from the direction of the theatre. In a very untheatrical gesture, she tipped up her chin towards the statue in the centre and everything surrounding it. ‘This is all normal for you?’ she asked, using the plural.

  ‘I suppose it is. We saw it as kids, on the way to school, going to see friends, walking home from the movies. Nothing more true than this.’

  ‘You think it’s why you are the way you are?’

  ‘Who? Venetians?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How are we?’ he asked, expecting her to talk about their fabled aloofness, their arrogance, their greed.

  ‘Sad,’ she said.

  ‘Sad?’ He could not keep the surprise, and the resistance, from his voice.

  ‘Yes. You had all of this, and now all you have is the memory of it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She started walking again. ‘I’ve been here almost a month, and all I hear in the bars, where people chat and say what they’re really thinking because they’re talking to other Venetians, is how terrible it all is: the crowds, the corruption, the cruise ships, the general cheapening of everything.’ They were just at Palazzo Franchetti, and she pointed to the windows: stone woven into gossamer, the light filtering through from the other side of the canal. The gates closed off the garden and the building.

  ‘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.