by Donna Leon
He brought his attention back to the table and their plates of fettuccine, glistening with the sheen of butter. The owner came back, carrying a small truffle on a white plate in one hand, a metal grater in the other. He set the plate down, bent over della Corte’s plate and shaved at the truffle, rose, then bent over Brunetti’s plate and did the same. The woody, musty odor wafted up from the still-steaming fettuccine, enveloping not only the three men but the entire area around them. Brunetti twirled the first forkful and began to eat, giving in wholeheartedly to the sensual delight of the butter, the perfectly cooked noodles, and the savory, heady taste of the truffle.
Della Corte was obviously a man who refused to spoil food with talk, and so they said little until the meal was finished, the duck almost as good as the truffles—for Brunetti, nothing was as good as truffles—and they sat with small glasses of Calvados in front of them.
It was at that point that a short, happily stout man approached their table. He wore the white jacket and black cummerbund that their own waiter had worn. “Signor Germani said you’d like to speak to me, Capitano.”
“Was it you I spoke to this morning?” della Corte asked, pushing out a chair and waving the man into it.
The waiter pulled the chair out a bit more in order to accommodate his substantial paunch and sat. “Yes, sir, it was.”
“I’d like you to repeat what you told me for my colleague here,” he said, nodding in Brunetti’s direction.
Looking at della Corte, the waiter began. “As I told you on the phone, sir, I didn’t recognize him when I first saw his picture in the paper. But then, when the barber was cutting my hair, it just came to me who he was, right out of the blue. So I called the police.”
Della Corte smiled and nodded as if to compliment the waiter on his sense of civic responsibility. “Go on,” he said.
“I don’t think I can tell you much more than I told you this morning, sir. He was with a woman. I described her to you on the phone.”
Della Corte asked him, “Could you repeat what you told me?”
“She was tall, as tall as he was, light eyes and skin, and light hair, not blonde, but almost. She was the same one he was here with before.”
“When were they here before?” della Corte asked.
“Once about a month ago, and once back in the summer, I forget when. I just remember that it was hot, and she wore a yellow dress.”
“How did they behave?” della Corte asked.
“Behave? You mean their manners?”
“No, I mean how they behaved toward one another.”
“Oh, do you mean was there anything between them?”
“Yes,” della Corte said and nodded.
“I don’t think so,” the waiter said and paused to consider the question. After a moment’s pause, he continued, “It was obvious that they weren’t married.” Even before della Corte could ask, the waiter explained, “I don’t know what it is that makes me say that, but I’ve watched a million couples here over the years, and there’s just a way people who are married behave with one another. I mean, whether it’s a good marriage or a bad one, even if they hate one another, they’re always comfortable with one another.” He waved the subject away as too complex to explain. Brunetti knew exactly what he meant but, like him, could never hope to explain it.
“And these people didn’t give you that idea?” Brunetti asked, speaking for the first time.
The waiter shook his head.
“Do you know what they talked about?”
“No,” the waiter said, “but whatever it was, they both seemed very happy about it. At one point during the meal, he showed her some papers. She looked at them for a while. That’s when she put on her glasses.”
“Do you have any idea what the papers were?” della Corte asked.
“No. When I brought their pasta, she gave them back to him.”
“And what did he do with them?”
“He must have put them in his pocket. I didn’t notice.” Brunetti glanced across at della Corte, who shook his head, signaling that no papers had been found on Favero.
“Could you tell us a bit more about what she looked like?” della Corte asked.
“Well, as I told you, she was somewhere in her thirties. Tall, light hair, but not natural. She had the coloring for it, light eyes, so maybe she was just helping it a little.”
“Anything else?” Brunetti asked, smiling and then sipping at his Calvados to suggest that the question had no special importance.
“Well, now that I know he’s dead, and by his own hand, I don’t know whether I noticed it at the time or I started to think it after I found out what had happened to him.” Neither Brunetti nor della Corte asked anything. “Well, something wasn’t right between them.” He reached forward and brushed some crumbs from the table, caught them in his hand, and then, seeing no place to put them, slipped them into the pocket of his jacket.
In the face of the silence of the two policemen, he continued, speaking slowly, thinking this out for the first time. “It was about halfway through the meal, when she was looking at the papers. She glanced up from them and gave him a look.”
“What kind of look?” della Corte finally asked after a long silence.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t angry or anything like that. She just looked at him like he was in a zoo or something, like she’d never seen anything like him. You know, like he was of a different species or had stepped out of a spaceship. I don’t know if I’m making the idea clear,” he said, letting his voice trail off inconclusively.
“Did it seem like the look was threatening in any way?”
“Oh, no, not at all.” He shook his head in an effort to convince them. “That’s what was so strange about it, that there was no anger in it. There was just nothing in it.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and gave an awkward grin. “I’m sorry. I’m not explaining this well.”
“Did he notice it?” Brunetti asked.
“No, he was pouring some more wine. But I saw it.”
“What about the other times?” Brunetti asked. “Did they get on well?”
“Oh, yes. They got on well those other times. I don’t mean to suggest that they didn’t get on well that night, either. They were always very friendly, but in a sort of semiformal way.”
“Were there any papers the other times?”
“No, nothing like that. They seemed like friends, no, like business associates having a meal together. That’s what it was like, the way two men who have to meet for business meet. Maybe that’s why I always found it so strange, such an attractive woman, and he was a handsome man, but there was none of that tension that you like to see between a man and a woman, none of that at all. Yes, now that I think about it, that’s what was so strange.” He smiled now, having finally figured it out.
“Do you remember what wine they drank?” Brunetti asked. Both the waiter and della Corte gave him puzzled glances.
The waiter thought about it for a while. “Barolo,” he finally answered. “A good, hearty red. Went well with the bistecche. And then vin santo with the dessert.”
“Did he leave the table at any time?” Brunetti asked, thinking about just how hearty those wines were and how easy it is to drop something in a glass.
“I don’t remember. He might have.”
“Do you remember if he paid with a credit card?” Brunetti asked.
“No, he paid with cash this time, and I have it in my mind that he paid with cash those other times, too.”
“Do you know if he’s come other times? Other than when you saw them?”
“I asked the other waiters, but no one remembers them. But it’s not likely. We’re closed Tuesday and Wednesday, and I’m here all of the other days. Haven’t missed a day of work in thirteen years, so if they came, I was here, and I don’t remember seeing them except for last week and those two other times. She’s a woman I’d remember.”
Della Corte glanced across the table at Brunetti, but he shook his hea
d. He had no more questions, not for now. Della Corte reached into his pocket and took out a small visiting card. “If you think of anything else, you can reach me at the Questura,” della Corte said, handing him the card. Then, in a voice he made casually neutral, he added, “Be sure to ask for me specifically.”
The waiter pocketed it, stood, and started to walk away from their table. Suddenly he stopped and came back toward them. “Do you want her glasses?” he asked without preamble.
“Excuse me?” della Corte said.
“Her glasses. She left them here, on the chair beside her. She must have taken them off after she looked at the papers and then forgot to take them with her. We found them after they left. Do you want them?”
Della Corte recovered himself immediately. “Yes, of course.”
The waiter disappeared and was back in a few moments, carrying a pair of wire-rimmed glasses in one hand. He held them up and, with almost childlike delight, said, “Look.” With that, he held them by the ends of the earpieces and twisted them around, as though the frame were made of rubber and this a very clever trick. Pretzel-like, they bent, and then, when he released the pressure, immediately sprang back to their original shape. “Isn’t that remarkable?” he asked. The waiter handed the glasses to della Corte and went back across the restaurant, toward the door that led to the kitchen.
“Why don’t they break?” della Corte asked, holding the glasses in one hand and twisting at them with the other, bending them just as the waiter had.
“Titanium,” Brunetti answered, though the question had been entirely rhetorical.
“What?” della Corte asked.
“Titanium,” Brunetti repeated. “My wife bought a new pair of reading glasses last month, and she told me about these. May I?” he asked, reaching for them. Della Corte handed them over, and Brunetti brought them close to his eyes, searching for a manufacturer’s sign. He found it, inside the right earpiece, up close to the hinge. “See,” he said, extending them to della Corte, his finger pointing to the tiny mark.
“What is it?” della Corte asked. “I don’t have my own glasses with me.”
“It’s Japanese,” Brunetti said. “At least I think it is. It’s only the Japanese who make these.”
“The Japanese?” della Corte asked. “They make glasses?”
“They make the frames,” Brunetti explained. “And these frames, I’d say, cost almost a million lire. At least that’s what my wife told me. If they’re titanium, and I think these are,” he said, twisting them once more into a painful shape and then releasing them suddenly and watching them snap back into shape, “then that’s what they cost.” Brunetti’s smile blossomed and he looked down at the glasses as though they had been transformed back into a million lire and he’d been told to keep them.
“What are you smiling at?” della Corte asked.
“Frames that cost a million lire,” Brunetti explained, “especially frames that are imported from Japan, ought to be very easy to trace.”
The same million lire appeared, but this time they were in della Corte’s smile.
21
It was Brunetti’s suggestion that they take the glasses to an optician and have the prescription of the lenses examined to make it even easier to identify them. Because the frames were not only expensive but imported, they should have been easy to trace, but this was to ignore the fact that della Corte, having been ordered to treat Favero’s death as a suicide, had to use his own time to search for the optician who had sold them, just as it was to ignore the possibility that they had been purchased in a city other than Padua.
Brunetti did what he could, assigning one of his junior officers the task of phoning all of the opticians in the Mestre-Venice area to ask if they carried those particular frames and, if so, whether they had ever filled them with that prescription. He then returned his attention to the Trevisan-Lotto-Martucci triangle, his interest centered on the survivors, both of whom would profit in some way from Trevisan’s death. The widow would probably inherit, and Martucci might well inherit the widow. Lotto’s murder, however, was difficult to fit into any pattern Brunetti envisioned that involved Martucci and Signora Trevisan. He did not for a moment question the fact that husbands and wives would want to, and often did, kill one another, but he found it difficult to believe that a sister would kill a brother. Husbands, even children, can be replaced, but one’s aged parents can never produce another son. Antigone had sacrificed her life to this truth. Brunetti realized that he needed to speak to both Signora Trevisan and to Avvocato Martucci again, and he thought it would be interesting to speak to them together and see how things fell out.
Before he did anything about that, however, he turned his attention to the papers that had accumulated on his desk. There was, as promised, the list of Trevisan’s clients, seven close-typed pages that held names and addresses in perfect and perfectly neutral alphabetical order. He glanced through it quickly, running his eyes down the column of names. At a few, he whistled under his breath; it appeared that Trevisan had planted his standard firmly among the ranks of the wealthiest citizens of the city as well as among those who passed for its nobility. Brunetti flipped back to the first page and began to read the names carefully. He realized that the attention he was giving them would, to a non-Venetian, pass for sober reflection; anyone bred on the incestuous rumors and cabals of the city would realize that he was doing no more than dredging up gossip, slur, and slander as he considered each name. There was Baggio, the director of the port, a man accustomed to power and its ruthless employment. There was Seno, owner of the largest glass-making workshop on Murano, employer of more than three hundred people, a man whose competitors seemed to share the common misfortune of being hit by strikes and unexplained fires. And there was Brandoni, Conte Brandoni, the exact source of whose immense wealth was as obscure as the origin of his title.
Some of the people on the list did have the most blameless, even the highest, of reputations; what Brunetti found peculiar was the promiscuity of names, the revered rubbing elbows with the suspect, the most highly honored mingling with the equivocal. He turned back to the F’s and searched for his father-in-law’s name, but Conte Orazio Falier was not listed. Brunetti laid the list aside, knowing that they would have no choice but to question all of them, one by one, and reproving himself for his reluctance to call his father-in-law to ask what he knew about Trevisan. Or about his clients.
Below the list, there was a painfully typed and inordinately long message from Officer Gravini, explaining that the Brazilian whore and her pimp had appeared at Pinetta’s the previous night and that he had “initiated” an arrest. “Initiated?” Brunetti heard himself asking aloud. That’s the sort of thing that came of allowing university graduates into the ranks. When Brunetti called downstairs and asked where they were, he learned that both had been brought over from the jail that morning and were being kept in separate rooms on Officer Gravini’s recommendation in case Brunetti wanted to question them.
Next was a fax from the police in Padua, reporting that the bullets recovered from Lotto’s body came from a .22 caliber pistol, though no tests had yet been performed to determine whether it was the same pistol used on Trevisan. Brunetti knew in his blood that any tests would do no more than confirm what he already knew.
Below that were more sheets of faxes, these bearing the SIP letterhead and containing the phone records he had asked Signorina Elettra to obtain from Giorgio. At the thought of Rondini and the many lists he had provided, Brunetti remembered the letter he had to write and the fact that he had not yet bothered to do so. The fact that Rondini felt he needed such a letter to give to his fiancée left Brunetti bemused as to why he would want to marry her, but he had long ago abandoned the idea that he understood marriage.
Brunetti admitted to himself that he also had no idea of what he hoped to learn from either Mara or her pimp, but he decided to go and speak to them anyway. He walked down to the first floor, which contained three separate cell-like room
s in which the police routinely interviewed suspects and others brought in for questioning.
Outside one of the rooms stood Gravini, a handsome young man who had joined the force last year, having spent the previous two trying to find someone who would give a job to a twenty-seven-year-old university graduate with a degree in philosophy and no previous work experience. Brunetti often wondered what had impelled Gravini to that decision, which philosopher’s precepts had moved him to take on the jacket, pistol, and cap of the forces of order. Or, the thought sneaked out from nowhere and leaped into Brunetti’s mind, perhaps Gravini had found in Vice-Questore Patta the living manifestation of Plato’s philosopher king.
“Good morning, sir,” Gravini said, snapping out a quick salute and demonstrating no surprise at the fact that his superior arrived laughing to himself. Philosophers, it is rumored, bear with these things.
“Which of them’s in there?” Brunetti asked, nodding his head at the door behind Gravini.
“The woman, sir.” Saying this, Gravini handed Brunetti a dark blue file. “The man’s record’s in here, sir. Nothing on her.”
Brunetti took the file and glanced at the two pages stapled to the inside cover. There was the usual: assault, selling drugs, living off the earnings of a prostitute. Franco Silvestri was one of thousands. After reading through it carefully, he handed the file back to Gravini. “Did you have any trouble bringing them in?”
“Not her, sir. It was almost as if she was expecting it. But the man tried to make a run for it. Ruffo and Vallot were with me, outside, and they grabbed him.”
“Well done, Gravini. Whose idea was it to take them along?”
“Well, sir,” Gravini said with a low cough. “I told them what I was going to do, and they offered to come along. On their own time, you understand.”
“You get along well with them, don’t you, Gravini?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Good, good. Well, let’s have a look at her.” Brunetti let himself into the grim little room. The only light came from a small, dirty window high on one wall, far higher than a person could hope to jump, and from a single sixty-watt bulb in a wire-covered fixture in the center of the ceiling.