by Donna Leon
Bambola took a long swipe at the counter, rinsed the cloth, and raised a hand to capture Vianello’s attention. ‘It’s like that in my country, too, Ispettore. If you do something they don’t like, they take you away and that’s the end of it.’ Then, perhaps disapprovingly, ‘But nothing so public as the way you police do it here.’
Vianello and Brunetti exchanged a glance but said nothing. They went back to the Questura, but Brunetti, glancing at his watch, decided to go home for lunch and give Alvise enough time to watch the videos from the parking garage.
‘But you’ve already seen it, Papà,’ Chiara insisted, setting her fork down and taking her attention away from her gnocchi with ragù. ‘Why do you want to see it again?’
‘Because it’ll probably be different,’ Raffi interrupted and said, to the general surprise of everyone else at the table.
‘Since when are you an expert?’ Chiara asked. Brunetti, struck by the words, backed up to relisten to the tone and found it more weighted with curiosity than sarcasm.
Raffi set down his own fork and took a sip of water. ‘It’s common sense, isn’t it? If I hear a band give two concerts, they’re not going to be the same, are they? Even if they play the same songs. So why not opera?’
‘But the story’s always the same,’ Chiara said. ‘The same things always have to happen.’
Raffi shrugged. ‘They’re not machines, are they? They have good days; they have bad days. Just like other singers.’
Well, Brunetti thought, at least Raffi hadn’t said ‘real’ singers. Perhaps there was hope.
Apparently satisfied with that explanation, Chiara turned to her mother and asked, ‘Why aren’t you going?’
Paola’s smile was her most bland, which was often her most dangerous. ‘You’re going to Lucia’s to study, and Raffi’s helping Franco get his boat back into the water this afternoon and staying for dinner.’ She got to her feet and took their plates as they handed them to her, put them in the sink and returned with an enormous platter of grilled vegetables.
‘I’m not sure that’s an answer, Mamma,’ Chiara said.
‘You’ll understand some day when you’re married and have kids, stella,’ Brunetti told her.
Her attention swivelled to him.
‘You get to be home alone, Chiara,’ Brunetti said.
‘What’s so great about that?’ Chiara asked.
Paola, who was facing her at the table, gave her a level, adult look. She tasted a thin wheel of zucchini, approved her own cooking, and took another bite. She set her elbow on the table and cupped her chin in her palm. ‘It means I do not have to prepare dinner, or serve it, or wash the dishes after it, Chiara. It means I can have bread and cheese and a salad, or no salad, or no bread and cheese, and make myself whatever I want to eat. But more importantly, it means I can eat when I want to, and I can read while I’m eating, and then I can go back to my study and lie on the sofa and read all evening.’ When she saw Chiara get ready to speak, Paola held up her hand and continued. ‘And it means I can come in here and get myself a glass of wine or a glass of grappa or make myself a coffee or a cup of tea or just have a glass of water, and I don’t have to talk to anyone or do anything for anyone. And then I can go back to my book, and when I’m tired, I’ll go to bed and read there.’
‘And that’s what you want to do?’ Chiara asked in a voice so small she could have been an ant standing under a leaf.
In a much warmer voice, Paola said, ‘Yes, Chiara. Once in a while, that’s what I want to do.’
With the back of her fork, Chiara mashed at a piece of carrot until it was an indistinguishable blob on her plate. Finally, in a voice that had grown a bit stronger, she asked, ‘But not always?’
‘No, not always.’
On the way back, Brunetti marvelled at the way Paola managed so successfully to teach her children the ways of the world with a grace and charity that often left him at a loss for words. As a child, it would never have occurred to him that his mother had a real life of her own. By definition, she was his mother. After all: that was her position and job in the cosmos, a planet circling the gravitational centre of her sons.
Chiara had just been forced into a new understanding of cosmology, where planets followed their own orbits and did not circle round at her convenience. Brunetti had read, just that week, an article reporting that 25 per cent of Americans did not know that the Earth circled the Sun: he wondered how many people ever realized that the world did not circle around them. ‘Better that she learn it now,’ he muttered to himself, then looked nervously around, hoping that no one had heard him.
He reached the Questura at three-thirty, just as Foa was pulling in to the dock. Vice-Questore Patta, coming up the stairs from the cabin, saw Brunetti and held up a restraining hand. He jumped, lithe and limber as an antelope, to the riva and walked away from the boat without bothering to thank the pilot, who tossed a cable around the stanchion and, when the boat was pulled up tight to the riva, took that day’s Gazzetta dello Sport from behind the tiller.
Brunetti waited, holding the door, for his superior. Perhaps because he was a commissario, Brunetti got a nod of acknowledgement. ‘Come up to my office in five minutes,’ Patta said and walked away.
Clearly, Brunetti thought, he was not the sun around which Planet Patta orbited.
He decided to turn the five into ten and went to see what Alvise might have discovered on the tapes. He found the officer in a closet-sized room into which had been crowded a single chair, a desk, and a laptop. A snake-necked desk lamp illuminated the area around the computer; some natural light came in from the single oval window behind Alvise.
He stood when he saw Brunetti at the door but did not salute, perhaps not trusting himself to do so in so small a space. ‘Good afternoon, Commissario,’ he said in a serious voice. ‘I think I have something.’
‘What is it?’ Brunetti asked, slipping around the desk to stand behind him, the better to see the screen.
‘A woman who came into the garage,’ Alvise said. He looked at some notes on his desk and continued. ‘On the eighteenth – that’s ten days ago – at three in the afternoon.’ He moved the chair a bit closer to the desk and asked, ‘Do you mind if I sit, Commissario? It makes it easier to use the computer.’
‘No, of course not, Alvise,’ Brunetti said and moved aside a bit to allow the officer to slide into the chair. Alvise put his forefinger on the pad and moved the cursor around on the screen. Brunetti bent over, the better to see, and a moment later Freddy emerged from the door to the stairs, walked directly towards the camera and quickly disappeared. Another moment passed, and a different camera showed him walking away from them, heading down a long line of cars. He stopped at one, moved around to the back, opened the boot and slung in his shoulder bag. He went to the driver’s door, opened it and got in, pulled the car out into the aisle, and drove away.
Alvise moved the cursor again, and this time a woman emerged from the same door and moved quickly to one side, where she was half hidden by a cement pillar. Occasionally, part of her head emerged from behind the pillar, then as quickly disappeared. ‘How many minutes later is this?’ Brunetti asked, not having noted the time in the previous film.
‘Thirty-four seconds, Commissario.’
The woman remained behind the pillar for two minutes and seven seconds, then turned and moved awkwardly back to the door and disappeared.
‘Did you see her again?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No, sir. The camera that shows the door stopped working two days later.’
‘Stopped working or was stopped?’
‘I called them at the garage, and they said it happens all the time.’
‘Thanks for doing this, Alvise. It must be exhausting, when all you have as a point of orientation is a parked car.’ Brunetti used the voice he had once used to praise the children’s drawings.
‘I checked all of the tapes twice. She’s the only person who came in but who didn’t go to a car and drive away.’
Brunetti stood upright and patted Alvise on the arm. ‘Good work,’ he said but then realized that Alvise might thank him for the praise. To avoid that, he said in a brisk voice, ‘You can go back to the squad room now. You’re back on the normal roster.’ Alvise stood quickly, managing to knock his chair over backwards. Brunetti took this opportunity to leave the room.
He walked up to Signorina Elettra’s workplace and, not seeing her at her desk, went and knocked at Patta’s door.
‘Avanti,’ his superior shouted, reminding Brunetti that Tosca uses the same word after she stabs Scarpia. ‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’ he muttered to himself and opened the door.
‘What’s this about your using that fool, Alvise, to try to find a suspect?’ Patta demanded as Brunetti entered his office.
Brunetti approached the desk and, without being asked to do so, took a seat facing the Vice-Questore. ‘He’s not a fool,’ he said. ‘And he’s found her.’
‘What?’
‘He’s found her,’ Brunetti repeated.
‘Her?’ Patta asked. Brunetti watched his superior open his mouth to say more and then change his mind.
Calmly, Brunetti continued. ‘He’s studied the surveillance tapes from the garage and managed to spot the person who probably tried to kill the Marchese d’Istria,’ he said, thinking this might be the first time in his life he had used Freddy’s title.
‘What tapes? Where’d they come from? How is it that Alvise saw them?’
Brunetti crossed his legs and explained calmly how they had requested and received the magistrate’s order to examine the tapes, being careful, as was his habit whenever he employed official procedures to obtain information, to report the least important details conscientiously to his superior.
‘You said “probably”. Does this mean you’re not sure?’ Patta asked, as if he expected the suspect to have already signed a confession.
‘One time he went to the garage, she came out of the same door he used, hid behind a column and watched him until he got into his car and drove away, then disappeared back through the door,’ Brunetti said.
‘Couldn’t there be some other explanation of what she did?’
‘I suppose so,’ Brunetti said in a measured, friendly voice. ‘She could have been looking for a place to plant a bomb, or perhaps she wanted to see how wide the parking spaces were, or maybe she was a tourist and mistook the parking garage for the Basilica di San Marco.’
Then, removing all jocularity from his voice, he said, ‘She followed him, hid, watched him, and left. If you can find a better explanation for her behaviour, Dottore, I’ll certainly consider it.’
‘All right, all right,’ Patta said, waving an exasperated hand at all these facts. ‘Who is she?’
‘We haven’t got that far yet, Signore,’ Brunetti answered. ‘She might be French. We’re checking on that.’
‘Don’t take so long about it that she stabs someone else,’ Patta said.
‘I’ll do my best, Vice-Questore,’ Brunetti said affably and got to his feet. ‘I’ll get on with it now.’ Imitating Alvise’s deference to superior rank, he raised his hand towards his forehead, turned and left the room.
Signorina Elettra was at her desk, speaking on the phone. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand and raised her chin in an inquisitive gesture. Brunetti pointed upwards, and she nodded her assent. She glanced towards Patta’s office and returned her attention to the telephone.
It was more than half an hour before she appeared outside Brunetti’s door. She closed it, sat in front of his desk, and placed some papers on her lap. She looked at the top one, at him, back at the paper, and said, ‘Dottor Maurice Lemieux – who is a chemist – owns a company that supplies pharmaceuticals to the French national health system. He is a widower and has two daughters: Chantal, who is thirty-six, married to an engineer who works for Airbus, has three children, and lives in Toulouse. And Anne-Sophie, who is thirty-four, not married, and lived with her father until three years ago, has never worked but studied at the Conservatory and left without finishing her courses.’
‘Studying what?’ Brunetti asked, though he knew, really.
‘Singing.’
Brunetti braced his left arm across his stomach and, resting his right elbow on it, rubbed at his face with his hand. He discovered a small patch just to the side of his mouth that he had missed while shaving that morning and continued to rub at it gently with the first two fingers of his hand.
‘Tell me more,’ he said.
She slid the first page from the others and laid it carefully face-down on his desk. Head lowered, she continued. ‘Three years ago, Doctor Maurice Lemieux took out a restraining order against his daughter Anne-Sophie, who is now prohibited from coming within two hundred metres of him or of her sister Chantal, her husband, or their children.’
‘Because?’
‘Because Anne-Sophie accused her father of trying to steal her sister’s affections from her.’ Signorina Elettra looked at him, then back at the papers.
‘Further, she accused her father of giving objects from his home – objects left by his wife to their two daughters equally but which Doctor Lemieux was allowed the possession of during his lifetime – to her sister, who supposedly moved them to her home in Toulouse.’ Before Brunetti could ask, she supplied the answer: ‘Paintings of great value, rare porcelain, furniture, their mother’s jewellery, and other objects which were listed in the formal accusation and are listed in his late wife’s will.’
‘So she’s the injured party?’ Brunetti asked, keeping his voice level.
‘That is not the way the police came to see it. Nor the judicial system.’
‘What happened?’
Signorina Elettra slid the second page aside and consulted the third. ‘She made phone calls to her father in which she accused him of betrayal and dishonesty. When Doctor Lemieux stopped answering her calls, Anne-Sophie began to send him emails which passed from accusation to threats. Finally, after more than a year of this, he consulted the police and filed a complaint after producing copies of the emails he had received from her.’
Signorina Elettra spoke as though she were reading aloud a fairy tale. ‘After the police authenticated and studied the mails, and the Doctor provided an affidavit from a court-appointed lawyer declaring that all of the items listed in the plaintiff’s accusation were still in Doctor Lemieux’s possession and in his home, the case was passed to a magistrate, and a court case was opened.’ Signorina Elettra lifted her eyes from the sheet of paper then placed it on top of the last.
‘It took a year for the judgment to be reached,’ she said, then added, in a more active voice, ‘Sounds like something that could happen here, doesn’t it?’
‘Too fast,’ Brunetti limited himself to saying.
She went on. ‘This is the judgment that is now in effect: she has to stay away from all of them.’
‘And has she?’
‘So it would seem,’ Signorina Elettra answered. ‘She may have left the country. At any rate, she’s had no contact with them for more than a year.’
‘Do they know where she is?’
Signorina Elettra shook her head. ‘I had no direct contact with them: all I saw were the police files.’
Brunetti thought of the flowers and the emeralds and the fact that Anne-Sophie had never worked, and asked, ‘Is this a wealthy family?’
Rather than answer the question directly, Signorina Elettra said, ‘One of the paintings she said her father gave to her sister is a Cézanne, and the other is a Manet.’
‘Ah,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Did the mother leave money to her daughters?’
She glanced at the papers, but Brunetti was of a mind that this was unnecessary. ‘Each received more than two million euros, and the person I spoke to in Paris said there was talk of Switzerland.’
With people who owned Cézannes, Brunetti knew, there was always talk of Switzerland.
‘Is there a photo?’ he asked.
/> Disconcertingly, because it made him wonder if she had somehow inserted a chip in his brain and could now read his thoughts, the next sheet she held was a photo, which she handed to him, saying, ‘She’s the third from the left in the second row.’
He looked and saw a class photo of girls in their teens, posed against a high bank of snow, all dressed for skiing and holding their skis upright, to the left of them. The third from the left in the second row was a tall teenaged girl with a happy smile plastered on her face. She could have been the sister of any of the other girls in the photo: in fact, most of them could have belonged to the same family.
‘When and where?’ he asked.
‘St Moritz, about twenty years ago. School ski holiday.’
‘What school?’ he asked, remembering the cracked blackboards and battered seats and desks of his liceo.
‘Swiss. Private. Expensive.’
‘Other photos?’
‘There used to be some family photos, but she took them all when she left her father’s house.’
‘And during all of this law case, which the press must have loved, no one managed to take a photo of her?’ he asked.
‘There are some, but from the side or from far away,’ said Signorina Elettra apologetically, as if she were responsible for the lack. Then, in explanation, ‘The French are more restrained about these things than we are. Not every trial turns into a circus.’
‘Lucky people,’ Brunetti said, then, seeing that she still had something important, he asked. ‘Anything else?’
‘She was in an automobile accident about five years ago, and spent more than two months in the hospital.’
‘What happened?’
‘She was driving through an intersection, and someone ran a red light and crashed into her car.’ She looked up at Brunetti, pausing, then said, not bothering to consult the paper, ‘Her mother was with her, and she was killed. So were the other driver and the person with him.’