by Donna Leon
No one spoke for a while, and then Flavia asked Brett, making it a statement, not a question, ‘She didn’t speak Italian, did she?’
‘No, she didn’t,’ Brett answered.
‘But both she and Semenzato spoke English, as I remember.’
‘What difference does that make?’ Brett asked, her voice edged with an anger Brunetti sensed but couldn’t fathom.
Flavia made a tsking sound with her tongue and turned in feigned exasperation to Brunetti. ‘Maybe it’s true what people say about us Italians, and we do have a greater sympathy with dishonesty than other people. You see, don’t you?’
He nodded. ‘It means,’ he explained to Brett when he saw that Flavia would not, ‘that she couldn’t deal with people here except through Semenzato. They had a common language.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Brett said. She understood now what they meant, but that didn’t mean she liked it. ‘So now Semenzato is guilty, just like that, and Matsuko is, too? Just because they both spoke English?’
Neither Brunetti nor Flavia said a word.
‘I worked with Matsuko for three years,’ Brett insisted. ‘She was an archaeologist, a curator. You two can’t just decide she was a thief, you can’t sit there and play judge and jury and decide she’s guilty without any information, any proof.’ Brunetti noted that she seemed to have no problem with their equal assumption of Semenzato’s guilt.
Still, neither of them answered her. Almost a full minute passed. Finally, Brett sat back in the sofa, then reached forward and picked up her glass. But she didn’t drink, merely swirled the champagne around in the glass and then put it back down on the table. ‘Occam’s Razor,’ she finally said in English, voice resigned.
Brunetti waited for Flavia to speak, thinking this might make some sense to her, but Flavia said nothing. So he asked, ‘Whose razor?’
‘William of Occam,’ Brett repeated, though she kept her eyes on her glass. ‘He was a medieval philosopher. English, I think. He had a theory that said the correct explanation to any problem was usually the one that made the simplest use of the available information.’
Signor William, Brunetti caught himself thinking, was clearly not an Italian. He glanced across at Flavia and would have sworn that her raised eyebrow carried the same message.
‘Flavia, could I have something different to drink?’ Brett asked, holding out the half-full glass. Brunetti noticed Flavia’s initial hesitation, the suspicious glance she cast at him, then back at Brett, and he thought how very similar it was to the look Chiara gave him when she was told to do something that would take her out of the room where he and Paola were talking about something they wanted to keep secret from her. With a fluid motion, she got up from her chair, took Brett’s glass, and walked towards the kitchen. At the door, she paused long enough to call back over her shoulder, ‘I’ll get you some mineral water. I’ll see that it takes me a long time to open the bottle.’ The door slammed and she was gone.
What was that all about? Brunetti wondered.
When Flavia was gone, Brett told him. ‘Matsuko and I were lovers. I never told Flavia, but she knows anyway.’ A hard clang from the kitchen confirmed the truth of this.
‘It began in Xian, about a year after she got to the dig.’ Then, to make things clearer, ‘We worked on the exhibition together, and she wrote a chapter for the catalogue.’
‘Whose idea was it that she collaborate on the show?’ Brunetti asked.
Brett made no attempt to hide her embarrassment. ‘Mine? Hers? I don’t remember. It just happened. We were talking about it one night.’ Under the bruises, she blushed. ‘And, in the morning, it had been decided that she would write the article and come to New York to help set up the show.’
‘But you came to Venice alone?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘We both went back to China after the New York opening. I went back to New York to close things down there and then Matsuko came to London to help me set up for the opening. We both went back to China right after that. Then I went back to pack it up for Venice. I thought she’d join me here for the opening, but she refused. She said she wanted . . .’ Brett’s voice dried up. She cleared her throat and repeated, ‘She said she wanted at least this part of the show to be all mine, so she wouldn’t come.’
‘But she came when it was over? When the pieces were sent back to China?’
‘She came from Xian for three weeks,’ Brett said. Brett stopped speaking and looked down at her clasped hands, muttering, ‘I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this,’ which, to Brunetti, suggested that she did.
‘Things were over between us by then, when she came here. I’d met Flavia at the opening. I told Matsuko when I got back to Xian about a month after the show opened here.’
‘How did she react when you told her?’
‘How would you expect her to react, Guido? She was gay, little more than a kid, caught between two cultures, raised in Japan and educated in America. When I went back to Xian after the Venice opening — I’d been away almost two months - she cried when I showed her the Italian catalogue with her article in it. She’d helped mount the most important show in our field in decades, and she was in love with her boss, and she thought her boss was in love with her. And there I was, breezing in from Venice to tell her everything was over, that I was in love with someone else, and when she asked why, I stupidly said something about culture, about the difficulty of ever really understanding someone from a different culture. I told her that she and I didn’t share it but that Flavia and I had a common culture.’ Another loud crash from the kitchen was enough to show this up as the lie it was.
‘How did she react?’ Brunetti asked.
‘If it had been Flavia, I suppose she would have killed me. But Matsuko was Japanese, no matter how long she had been in America. She bowed very deeply and left my room.’
‘And after that?’
‘After that, she was the perfect assistant. Very formal and distant and very efficient. She was gifted in what she did.’ She paused for a long time and then said, ‘I don’t like what I did to her, Guido,’ in a soft voice.
‘Why did she come here to send things back to China?’
‘I was in New York,’ Brett said, as if that explained things. To Brunetti, it didn’t, but he decided to leave that until later. ‘I called Matsuko and asked her if she would oversee the closing here and send things back to China.’
‘And she agreed?’
‘I told you, she was my assistant. The exhibition meant as much to her as it did to me.’ Hearing how that sounded, Brett added, ‘At least I thought it did.’
‘What about her family?’ he asked.
Obviously surprised by the question, Brett asked, ‘What about them?’
‘Are they rich?’
‘Ricca sfondata,’ she explained. Bottomless wealth. ‘Why do you ask that?’
‘To understand if she did it for money,’ he explained.
‘I don’t like the way you simply assume that she was involved in this,’ Brett protested, but weakly.
‘Is it safe to come back?’ Flavia asked in a loud voice from the kitchen.
‘Stop it, Flavia,’ Brett shot back angrily
Flavia came back, carrying a single glass of mineral water, bubbles swirling up happily from the bottom. She set it down in front of Brett, looked at her watch, and said, ‘It’s time for you to take your pills.’ Silence. ‘Do you want me to get them?’
With no warning, Brett slammed her fist down on the surface of the marble table, causing the tray to rattle and a jolt of bubbles to swirl up from the bottom of all the glasses. ‘I’ll get my own pills, damn it.’ She pushed herself up from the sofa and walked quickly across the room. Seconds later, the sharp crack of another slammed door echoed back into the living room.
Flavia sat back in her chair, picked up her champagne glass, and took a sip. ‘Warm,’ she remarked. The champagne? The temperature of the room? Brett’s temper? She poured the contents of her glass into Brett’s champagne glass
and emptied the bottle into her own. She took a tentative sip, then smiled across at Brunetti. ‘Better.’ She set the glass on the table.
Not knowing if this was a piece of theatre or not, Brunetti decided to wait her out. Companionably, they sipped at their drinks for a while, until Flavia finally asked, ‘How necessary was the guard in the hospital?’
‘Until I have some clearer idea of what’s going on here, I won’t know how necessary anything is,’ he answered.
Her smile was broad. ‘How refreshing it is to hear a public official admit to ignorance,’ she said, reaching forward to place her empty glass on the table.
The champagne gone, her voice changed and grew more serious. ‘Matsuko?’ she asked.
‘Probably.’
‘But how would she know Semenzato? Or know enough about him to know he’d be the person to contact?’
Brunetti considered this. ‘It seems he had a reputation, at least here.’
‘The kind of reputation Matsuko would know about?’
‘Perhaps. She’d worked with antiquities for years, so she probably heard things. And Brett said her family was very rich. Maybe the very rich know about this sort of thing.’
‘Yes, we do,’ she agreed with an offhandedness he was sure was real. ‘It’s almost a private club, as if we’d taken a vow to keep one another’s secrets. And it’s always easy, very easy, to know where to find a crooked tax lawyer - not that there’s any other type, at least not in this country — or someone who can get drugs, or boys, or girls, or someone who’s willing to see that a painting gets from one country to another, and no questions asked. Of course, I’m not sure how these things work in Japan, but I don’t see why there should be any difference. Wealth carries its own passport.’
‘Had you heard anything about Semenzato?’
‘I told you, I met him only that one time, and I didn’t like him, so I wasn’t interested in anything that was said about him. And it’s too late to find out now, since everyone will be busy talking well of him.’ She reached forward and took Brett’s drink and sipped at it. ‘Of course, that will change in a few weeks, and people will go back to telling the truth about him. But now’s not the time to try to find that out.’ She set the glass back on the table.
Though he thought he knew what the answer would be, he still asked, ‘Has Brett said anything about Matsuko? That is, since Semenzato was killed?’
Flavia shook her head. ‘She hasn’t said much about anything. Not since this began.’ She leaned forward and shifted the glass a few millimetres to the left. ‘Brett is afraid of violence. That doesn’t make any sense to me because she’s very brave. We Italian women aren’t, you know. We’re brash and brazen, but we have little physical courage. She’s off in China, living in a tent half of the time, roaming around the country. She even went to Tibet on a bus. She told me that when the Chinese officials refused to give her a visa, she simply forged the papers and went. She’s not afraid of that sort of thing, of the things that most people are terrified of, of getting into official trouble or being arrested. But actual physical violence terrifies her. I think it’s because she lives in her mind so much, solving things there and working them out there. She hasn’t been the same since this happened. She doesn’t want to answer the door. She pretends she doesn’t hear or she waits for me to go and do it. But the reason is that she’s afraid.’
Brunetti wondered why Flavia was telling him all of this. ‘I’ve got to leave next week,’ she said, answering his question. ‘My children have been skiing with their father for two weeks, and they come home then. I’ve cancelled three performances, but I can’t cancel any more. And I don’t want to. I’ve asked her to come with me, but she refuses.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. She won’t say. Or she can’t.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘I think she’d listen to you.’
‘If I said what?’
‘If you asked her to go with me.’
‘To Milan?’
‘Yes. Then, in March, I have to go to Munich for a month. She could come with me.’
‘What about China? Isn’t she supposed to go back there?’
‘And end up with her neck broken on the floor of that pit?’ Even though he knew her anger wasn’t directed at him, he still winced at the sound of it.
‘Has she talked about going back?’ he asked.
‘She hasn’t talked about anything.’
‘Do you know when she was supposed to leave?’
‘I don’t think she had any plan. When she arrived, she said she didn’t have a return reservation.’ She met Brunetti’s inquisitive look. ‘That depended on what she learned from Semenzato.’ From her tone, it was clear that this was only part of the explanation. He waited for her to finish it. ‘But part of it depended on me, I suppose.’ She paused, looked away from Brunetti, then quickly back. ‘She’s managed to get me an invitation to teach master classes there, in Beijing. She wanted me to go back with her.’
‘And?’ Brunetti asked.
Flavia dismissed the idea with a wave of her hand but said only, ‘We hadn’t discussed it before this happened.’
‘And not since?’
She shook her head.
All of this talk of Brett made Brunetti suddenly realize that she had been gone from the room for a long time. ‘Is that the only door?’ he asked.
His question was so sudden that Flavia took a moment to understand it and then to understand everything it meant.
‘Yes. There’s no other way out. Or in. And the roof is separate. There’s no access to it.’ She got up. ‘I’ll go and see how she is.’
She was gone a long time, during which Brunetti picked up the book that Brett had left on the sofa and paged through it. He stared at the photo of the Ishtar Gate for a long time, trying to see which part of the figure appeared on the brick that had killed Semenzato. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, but he proved incapable of fitting the single missing piece that lay in the police laboratory at the Questura into the whole picture of the gate that lay in front of him.
It was almost five minutes before Flavia came back. She stood by the table while she spoke, letting Brunetti know that their conversation was over. ‘She’s asleep. The pain pills she’s taking are very strong, and I think there’s a tranquillizer, too. The champagne didn’t help things. She’ll sleep until the afternoon.’
‘I need to speak to her again,’ he said.
‘Can it wait until tomorrow?’ It was a simple question, not an imperious demand.
It really couldn’t, but he had no choice. ‘Yes. Is it all right if I come at about the same time?’
‘Of course. I’ll tell her you’re coming. And I’ll try to limit the champagne.’ The conversation might be over, but the truce apparently held.
Brunetti, who had decided that Dom Perignon was an excellent mid-morning drink, thought this an unnecessary precaution and hoped that Flavia might change her mind by the next day.
* * * *
Chapter Twelve
Was this the beginning of alcoholism, Brunetti wondered, as he found himself wanting to stop in a bar on the way back to the Questura and have another glass of champagne? Or was it merely the inescapable response to the certainty that he would have to speak to Patta that morning? The first explanation seemed preferable.
When he opened the door to his office, a wave of heat swept across him, so palpable that he turned to see if he could watch it roll down the corridor, perhaps to engulf some innocent soul unfamiliar with the vagaries of the heating system. Each year, on or about the feast day of Saint Agatha, 5 February, heat flared out of all the rooms on the north side of the fourth floor of the Questura at the same time as it disappeared from the corridors and the offices on the south side of the third floor. It remained this way for about three weeks, generally until the feast of Saint Leandro, whom most people in the building tended to thank for their deliverance. No one had ever been able to understand or correc
t this phenomenon, though it had gone on for five years or more. The main heating unit had, at various times and by various technicians, been worked on, inspected, adjusted, tinkered with, sworn at and kicked, but it had never been repaired. By now, people who worked on these two floors were resigned and took the necessary measures, some removing jackets while others wore gloves in the office.
So closely did Brunetti associate this phenomenon with the feast of Saint Agatha that he could never see an image of that martyr, invariably pictured holding her two severed breasts on a plate, but he imagined she was carrying thereon, instead, two matching pieces from the central heating unit: large washers, perhaps.
He walked across the room, stripping off coat and jacket as he went, and threw open both the tall windows. He was as suddenly chilled and went back to take his jacket from his desk, where he had tossed it. Over the course of the years, he had developed a rhythm for opening and closing the windows, one that not only effectively controlled the temperature in the room but also prevented him from concentrating on anything at all. Could the caretaker be in the pay of the Mafia? Each time he read the paper, it seemed that almost every other person who worked for the police was, so why not the caretaker?