by Donna Leon
‘My sister-in-law’s next-door neighbour is her maid. Goes in three times a week to clean, keeps an eye on the place for her when she’s in China. She’s talked about what’s in there, says it must be worth a fortune.’
‘Not the best thing to be saying about a place that’s left empty so much, is it?’ Brunetti asked, voice stern.
‘That’s just what I told her, sir.’
‘I hope she listened.’
‘I do, too.’
His indirect reprimand having failed to work, Brunetti returned to the gorillas. ‘Check the hospitals again to see if the one she wounded has been in. It sounds like she cut him badly. What about the prints on that envelope?’
Vianello looked up from his notebook. ‘I’ve sent copies to Rome and asked them to let us know what they have.’ Both of them knew how long that could take.
‘Try Interpol, as well.’
Vianello nodded and added the suggestion to his notes. ‘What about Semenzato?’ Vianello asked. ‘What was the meeting about?’
‘I don’t know. Ceramics, I think, but she was too drugged to explain anything clearly. Do you know anything about him?’
‘No more than anyone in the city does, sir. He’s been at the museum for about seven years. Married, wife from Messina, I think. Somewhere in Sicily. No children. Good family, and his reputation at the museum is good.’
Brunetti didn’t bother to ask Vianello how he came by this information, no longer surprised by the archive of personal information the sergeant had accumulated during his years with the police. Instead, he said, ‘See what you can find out about him. Where he worked before he came here and why he left, where he studied.’
‘You going to talk to him, sir?’
Brunetti considered this for a moment. ‘No. If whoever sent them wanted to scare her away from him, then I want them to believe they succeeded. But I want to see what there is to find out about him. And see what you can learn about those men in Mestre.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Vianello answered, making note of this. ‘You ask her about their accent?’
Brunetti had already thought of this, but there had been too little time with Brett. Her Italian was perfect, so their accents would have given her an idea of what part of the country they came from. ‘I’ll ask her tomorrow.’
‘In the meantime, I’ll look into gorillas in Mestre,’ Vianello said. With a grunt, he got out of the chair and left the office.
Brunetti pushed back his chair, pulled the bottom drawer of his desk open with his toe, and rested his crossed feet on it. He slouched down in his chair and latched his fingers behind his head, then turned and looked out of the window. From this angle, the fa ç ade of San Lorenzo wasn’t visible, but he could see a patch of cloudy, late-winter sky, a monotony that might induce thought.
She had said something about the ceramics in the show, and that could only mean the show she had helped arrange four or five years ago, the first time in recent years that museum-goers in the West had been allowed to see the marvels currently being excavated in China. And he had thought her to be in China still.
He had been surprised to see her name on the crime report that morning, shocked to see her bruised face in the hospital. How long had she been back? How long was she intending to stay? And what had brought her back to Venice? Flavia Petrelli would be able to answer some of those questions; Flavia Petrelli might herself be the answer to one of them. But those questions could wait; for the moment, he was more interested in Dottor Semenzato.
He let his chair drop forward with a bang, reached for the phone, and dialled a number from memory.
‘Pronto,’ said the familiar deep voice.
‘Ciao, Lele,’ Brunetti responded. ‘Why aren’t you out painting?’
‘Ciao, Guido, come stai?’ Then, without waiting for an answer, he explained. ‘Not enough light today. I went out to the Zattere this morning, but I came back without doing anything. The light’s flat, dead. So I came back here to fix lunch for Claudia.’
‘How is she?’
‘Fine, fine. And Paola?’
‘Good, so are the kids. Look, Lele, I’d like to talk to you. Can you spare me some time this afternoon?’
‘Talk talk or police talk??
‘Police talk, I’m afraid. Or I think it is.’
‘I’ll be at the gallery after three if you want to come over then. Until about five.’ From the background, Brunetti heard a hissing sound, a muttered, ‘Puttana Eva,’ and then Lele said, ‘Guido, I’ve got to go. The pasta’s boiling over.’ Brunetti barely had time to say goodbye before the phone went dead.
If anyone would know about Semenzato’s reputation, it was Lele. Gabriele Cossato, painter, antiquarian, lover of beauty, was as much a part of Venice, it seemed, as were the four Moors, poised in eternal confabulation to the right of the basilica of San Marco. For as far back as Brunetti could remember, there had been Lele, and Lele had been a painter. When Brunetti remembered his childhood, he recalled Lele, a friend of his father, and he remembered the stories, told then even to him, for he was a boy and so was expected to understand, about Lele’s women, that endless succession of donne, signore, ragazze, with whom Lele would appear at the Brunettis’ table. The women were all gone now, forgotten in his love for his wife of many years, but his passion for the beauty of the city remained, that and his limitless familiarity with the art world and all it encompassed: antiquarians and dealers, museums and galleries.
He decided to go home for lunch and then go to see Lele directly from there. But then he remembered that it was Tuesday, which meant that Paola would be having lunch with the members of her department at the university, and that in its turn meant that the children would eat with their grandparents, leaving him to cook and eat a meal alone. To avoid that, he went to a local trattoria and spent the meal thinking about what could be so important about a discussion between an archaeologist and a museum director that it had to be prevented with such violence.
A little after three, he crossed the Accademia Bridge and cut left towards Campo San Vio and, beyond it, Lele’s gallery. The artist was there when he arrived, perched on a ladder, a torch in one hand, a pair of electrical clippers in the other, reaching into a spaghetti-like mass of electrical wires housed behind a wooden panel above the door to the back room of the gallery. Brunetti was so accustomed to seeing Lele in his three-piece pin-striped suits that, even though the painter was perched at the top of the ladder, his position seemed not at all incongruous. Looking down, Lele greeted him, ‘Ciao, Guido. Just a minute while I join these together.’ So saying, he laid the torch on the top of the ladder, peeled back the plastic covering off one wire, twisted the exposed part around a second wire, then took a thick roll of black tape from his back pocket and bound the two together. With the point of the clippers, he poked the wire back among the others that ran parallel to it. Then, looking down at Brunetti, he said, ‘Guido, go into the storeroom and throw the switch for the current.’
Obedient, he went into the large storeroom on the right and stood for a moment at the door, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness.
‘Just on the left,’ Lele called.
Turning, he saw the large electrical panel attached to the wall. He pulled the main circuit breaker down, and the storeroom was suddenly flooded with light. He waited again, this time for his eyes to adjust to the brightness, then went back into the main room of the gallery.
Lele was already down from the ladder, the panel closed above him. ‘Hold the door,’ he said and walked towards Brunetti, carrying his ladder. He quickly stored it in the back room and emerged, brushing dust from his hands.
‘Pantegana,’ he explained, giving the Venetian name for rat, a word which, though it named them clearly - rat - still managed to make them, in the naming, somehow charming and domestic. ‘They come and eat the covering on the wires.’
‘Can’t you poison them?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Bah,’ Lele snorted. ‘They prefer the poison t
o the plastic. They thrive on it. I can’t even keep paintings in the storeroom anymore; they come in and eat the canvas. Or the wood.’
Brunetti looked automatically at the paintings hanging on the walls of the gallery, vividly coloured scenes of the city, alive with light and filled with Lele’s energy.
No, they’re safe. They’re too high up. But some day I expect to come in and find the little bastards have moved the ladder in the night and climbed up to eat them all.’ The fact that Lele laughed when he said this made him sound no less serious about it. He dropped the clippers and tape into a drawer and turned to Brunetti. ‘All right, what is this talk that might be police talk?’
‘Semenzato, at the museum, and the Chinese exhibition held there a few years ago,’ Brunetti explained.
Lele grunted in acknowledgement of the request and moved across the room to stand under a wrought-iron candelabrum attached to the wall. He reached up and bent one of the leaf-shaped prongs a bit to the left, stepped back to examine it, then leaned forward to bend it a tiny bit more. Satisfied, he went back to Brunetti.
‘He’s been at the museum for about eight years, Semenzato, and he’s managed to organize a number of international shows. That means he’s got good connections with museums or their directors in foreign countries, knows a lot of people in lots of places.’
‘Anything else?’ Brunetti asked, voice neutral.
‘He’s a good administrator. He’s hired a number of excellent people and brought them to Venice. There are two restorers he all but stole from the Courtauld, and he’s done a lot to change the way the exhibitions are publicized.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed that.’ At times, Brunetti felt that Venice had been turned into a whore forced to choose between different Johns: first the city was offered the face from a Phoenician glass earring, saw the poster reproduced a thousand times, then that was quickly replaced with a portrait by Titian, which in turn was driven out by Andy Warhol, himself then quickly banished by a Celtic silver deer as the museums covered every available surface in the city and vied endlessly for the attention and box office receipts of the passing tourists. What would come next, he wondered, Leonardo T-shirts? No, they already had them in Florence. He’d seen enough posters for art shows to last a lifetime in hell.
‘Do you know him?’ Brunetti asked, wondering if that was the reason for Lele’s uncharacteristic objectivity.
‘Oh, we’ve met a few times.’
‘Where?’
‘The museum has called me in a few times to ask about majolica pieces they were offered, if I thought they were genuine or not.’
‘And you met him then?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you think of him personally?’
‘He seemed a very pleasant, competent man.’
Brunetti had had enough. ‘Come on, Lele, this is unofficial. It’s me, Guido, asking you, not Commissario Brunetti. I want to know what you think of him.’
Lele looked down at the surface of the desk that stood beside him, moved a ceramic bowl a few millimetres to the left, glanced up at Brunetti, and said, ‘I think his eyes are for sale.’
‘What?’ asked Brunetti, not understanding at all.
‘Like Berenson. You know, you become an expert on something, and then people come to you and ask you if a piece is genuine or not. And because you’ve spent years or perhaps even your entire life studying something, learning about a painter or a sculptor, they believe you when you say a piece is genuine. Or that it’s not.’
Brunetti nodded. Italy was full of experts; some of them even knew what they were talking about. ‘Why Berenson?’
‘It seems he sold his eyes. Gallery owners or private collectors would ask him to authenticate certain pieces, and sometimes he’d say that they were genuine, but later they’d turn out not to be.’ Brunetti started to ask a question, but Lele cut him off. ‘No, don’t even ask if it could have been an honest mistake. There’s proof that he was paid, especially by Duveen, that he got a share of the take. Duveen had a lot of rich American clients; you know the type. They can’t be bothered learning about art, probably don’t even like it much, but they want to be known to have it, to own it. So Duveen matched their desire and their money with Berenson’s reputation and expertise, and everyone was happy; the Americans with their paintings, all with clear attributions; Duveen with the profits from the sales; and Berenson with both his reputation and his cut of the take.’
Brunetti paused a moment before he asked, ‘And Semenzato does the same?’
‘I’m not sure. But of the last four pieces they brought me in to take a look at, two were imitations.’ He thought for a moment, then added, grudgingly, ‘Good imitations, but still imitations.’
‘How did you know?’
Lele looked at him as though Brunetti had asked him how he knew a particular flower was a rose and not an iris. ‘I looked at them,’ he said simply.
‘Did you convince them?’
Lele weighed for a moment whether to be offended by the question or not, but then he remembered that Brunetti was, after all, only a policeman. ‘The curators decided not to acquire the pieces.’
‘Who had decided, originally, to buy them?’ But he knew the answer.
‘Semenzato.’
‘And who was offering to sell them?’
‘We were never told. Semenzato said it was a private sale, that he had been contacted by a private dealer who wanted to sell the pieces, two plates that were supposed to be Florentine, fourteenth century, and two Venetian. Those two were genuine.’
‘All from the same source?’
‘I think so.’
‘Could they have been stolen?’ Brunetti asked.
Lele considered this for a while before he answered. ‘Perhaps. But major pieces like that, if they’re genuine, people know about them. There’s a record of sales, and people who know majolica have a pretty good idea of who owns the best pieces and when they’re sold. But that’s not an issue with the Florentine pieces. They were fakes.’
‘What was Semenzato’s reaction when you said they were?’
‘Oh, he said that he was very glad I’d discovered it and saved the museum from an embarrassing acquisition. That’s what he called it, “an embarrassing acquisition”, as though it was perfectly all right for the dealer to try to sell pieces that were frauds.’
‘Did you say any of this to him?’ Brunetti asked.
Lele shrugged, a gesture that summed up centuries, perhaps millennia, of survival. ‘I didn’t have the feeling that he wanted to hear anything like that.’
‘And what happened?’
‘He said he’d return them to the dealer and tell him that the museum wasn’t interested in those two pieces.’
‘And the others?’
‘The museum went ahead and bought them.’
‘From the same dealer?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Did you ask who it was?’
That question earned Brunetti another of those looks. ‘You can’t ask that,’ Lele explained.
Brunetti had known Lele all his life, so he asked, ‘Did the curators tell you who he was?’
Lele laughed in open delight at having his high-minded pose so easily shattered. ‘I asked one of them, but they had no idea. Semenzato never mentioned the name.’
‘How did he know the seller wouldn’t try to sell the ones you didn’t buy again, to another museum or to a private collector?’
Lele smiled his crooked smile, one side of his mouth turning down, the other up, a smile Brunetti had always thought best expressed the Italian character, never quite sure of gloom or glee and always ready to switch from one to the other. ‘I saw no point in mentioning it to him.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s always struck me as the kind of man who doesn’t like to be questioned or given advice.’
‘But you were called in to look at the plates.’
Again, that grin. ‘By the curators. That’s why I said he didn
’t like to be given advice. He didn’t like it that I said they weren’t genuine. He was gracious and he thanked me for my help, said the museum was grateful. But he still didn’t like it.’
‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Very,’ Lele agreed, ‘especially from a man whose job is to protect the integrity of the museum’s collection. And,’ he added, ‘to see that fakes don’t remain on the market.’ He moved in front of Brunetti and crossed the room to straighten a painting hanging on the far wall.
‘Is there anything else I should know about him?’ Brunetti asked.
Facing away from Brunetti, looking at his own painting, Lele replied, ‘I think there’s probably a lot more you should know about him.’