by Donna Leon
Brunetti pressed the bell. Nothing happened for a long time, so Brunetti pressed it again, this time holding it for much longer. The two men exchanged a glance, and Brunetti pulled out the list, looking for the next address. Just as he turned away to the left and up toward the Accademia, a disembodied, high-pitched voice called out from the speaker above the name plates.
‘Who is it?’
The voice was imbued with the asexual plaint of age, providing Brunetti with no idea of how to address the speaker, whether Signora or Signore. ‘Is that the da Prè family?’ he asked.
‘Yes. What do you want?’
‘There are some questions about the estate of Signorina da Prè, and we need to talk to you.’
Without further question, the door clicked open, letting them into a broad courtyard with a vine-covered well in the centre. The only staircase was through a door on the left. On the landing at the second floor, a door stood open, and in it stood one of the smallest men Brunetti had ever seen.
Though neither Vianello nor Brunetti was particularly tall, they both towered over this man, who seemed to grow even smaller as they drew near him.
‘Signor da Prè?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, coming a step forward from the door and extending a hand no larger than a child’s. Because the man raised his hand almost to the height of his own shoulder, Brunetti did not have to lean down to take it; otherwise, he would certainly have had to do so. Da Prè’s handshake was firm, and the glance he shot up toward Brunetti’s eyes was clear and direct. His face was narrow, almost blade-like in its thinness. Either age or prolonged pain had cut deep grooves on either side of his mouth and scooped out dark circles under his eyes. His size made his age impossible to determine: he could have been anywhere from fifty to seventy.
Taking in Vianello’s uniform, Signor da Prè did not extend his hand and did no more than nod in his direction. He stepped back through the door, opening it wider and inviting the two men into the apartment.
Muttering ‘Permesso,’ the two policemen followed him into the hall and waited while he closed the door.
‘This way, please,’ the man said, heading back down the corridor.
From behind him, Brunetti saw the sharp hump that stuck up through the cloth of the left side of his jacket like the breastbone of a chicken. Though da Prè did not actually limp, his whole body canted to the left when he walked, as though the wall were a magnet and he a sack of metal filings pulled toward it. He led them into a living room that had windows on two sides. Rooftops were visible from those on the left, while the others looked across to the shuttered windows of a building on the other side of the narrow calle.
All of the furniture in the room was on the same scale as two monumental cupboards that filled the back wall: a high-backed sofa that seated six; four carved chairs which, from the ornamental work on their armrests, must have been Spanish; and an immense Florentine sideboard, its top littered with countless small objects at which Brunetti barely glanced. Da Prè climbed up into one of the chairs and waved Brunetti and Vianello into two of the others.
Brunetti’s feet, when he sat down, just barely reached the floor, and he noticed that da Prè’s hung midway between the seat and the floor. Somehow, the intense sobriety of the man’s face kept the wild disparity in scale from being in any way ridiculous.
‘You said there is something wrong with my sister’s will?’ da Prè began, voice cool.
‘No, Signor da Prè,’ Brunetti returned, ‘I don’t want to confuse the issue or mislead you. Our curiosity has nothing to do with your sister’s will or with any stipulations that might be made in it. We’re interested, instead, in her death, or with the cause of her death.’
‘Then why didn’t you say that at the beginning?’ the little man asked, voice warmer now, but not in a way that Brunetti liked.
‘Are those snuff boxes, Signor da Prè?’ Vianello interrupted, getting down from his chair and going over to the sideboard.
‘What?’ the little man said sharply.
‘Are these snuff boxes?’ Vianello asked, bending down over the surface, bringing his face closer to the small objects that covered it.
‘Why do you ask?’ da Prè said, voice no warmer but certainly curious.
‘My uncle Luigi, in Trieste, collected them. I always loved going to visit him when I was a boy because he’d show them to me and let me touch them.’ As if to eliminate that fearful possibility from taking root in Signor da Prè’s mind, Vianello grasped his hands behind his back and did no more than lean closer to the boxes. He pulled his hands apart and pointed to one, careful to keep his finger at least a handsbreadth away from the box. ‘Is this one Dutch?’
‘Which one?’ da Prè asked, getting down from his chair and going over to stand beside the sergeant.
Da Prè’s head came barely to the top of the sideboard, so he had to stand on tiptoe to see to the back of the surface, to the box that Vianello was pointing at. ‘Yes, it’s Delft. Eighteenth-century.’
‘And this one?’ Vianello asked, pointing still and not presuming to touch. ‘Bavarian?’
‘Very good,’ da Prè said, picking up the tiny box and handing it to the sergeant, who was careful to take it in both cupped hands.
Vianello turned it over and looked at the bottom. ‘Yes, there’s the mark,’ he said, tilting it toward da Prè. ‘It’s a real beauty, isn’t it?’ he said in a voice rich with enthusiasm. ‘My uncle would have loved this one, especially the way it’s divided into two chambers.’
As the two men, heads close together, continued to examine the small boxes, Brunetti looked around the room. Three of the paintings were seventeenth-century, very bad paintings and very bad seventeenth-century: the death of stags, boars, and then more stags. There was too much blood in them and far too much artistically posed death to interest Brunetti. The others appeared to be biblical scenes, but they too all had to do with the shedding of great quantities of blood, this time human. Brunetti turned his attention to the ceiling, which had an elaborately stuccoed centre medallion, from the middle of which hung a Murano glass chandelier made of hundreds of small-petalled pastel flowers.
He glanced again at the two men, now crouched down in front of an open door on the right side of the cupboard. The shelves inside held what seemed to Brunetti to be hundreds more of the tiny boxes. For a moment, Brunetti felt himself suffocated with the strangeness of this giant’s living room in which a tiny doll of a man had trapped himself, with only these bright enamelled momentos of a forgotten age to remind himself of what must be, for him, the true scale of things.
The two men got to their feet as Brunetti watched. Da Prè closed the door of the cabinet and came back to his chair and with a little, practised hop resumed his place in it. Vianello lingered a moment, giving a last admiring glance at the boxes arrayed across the top, but then returned to his own chair.
Brunetti dared a smile for the first time, and da Prè, returning it and glancing toward Vianello, said, ‘I didn’t know such people worked for the police.’
Neither did Brunetti, but that didn’t for a moment stop him from saying, ‘Yes, the sergeant is quite well known at the Questura for his interest in snuff boxes.’
Hearing in Brunetti’s tone the irony with which the unenlightened perpetually regard the true enthusiast, da Prè said, ‘They’re an important part of European culture, snuff boxes. Some of the finest craftsmen on the continent devoted years of their lives – decades – to making them. There was no better way for a person to show appreciation than by giving a snuff box. Mozart, Haydn ...’ Da Prè’s enthusiasm overcame his words, and he finished with a wild flourish of one of his little arms toward the laden sideboard.
Vianello, who had nodded in silent assent through all of this speech, said to Brunetti, ‘I’m afraid you don’t understand, Commissario.’
Brunetti, who had no idea how he had deserved to be sent this clever man who could so easily disarm even the most antagonistic witness, nodde
d in humble agreement.
‘Did your sister share your enthusiasm?’ Vianello’s question was seamless.
The little man kicked one tiny foot at the rung of his chair. ‘No, my sister had no enthusiasm for them.’ Vianello shook his head at such an error, and da Prè, encouraged by that, added, ‘And no enthusiasm for anything else.’
‘None at all?’ Vianello asked, with what sounded like real concern.
‘No,’ da Prè repeated. ‘Not unless you count her enthusiasm for priests.’ The manner in which he pronounced the last word suggested that the only enthusiasm he was likely to have for priests would arise from signing the orders for their execution.
Vianello shook his head, as if he could think of no greater peril, especially for a woman, than to fall into the hands of priests.
Voice filled with horror, Vianello asked, ‘She didn’t leave them anything, did she?’ Then, just as quickly, he added, ‘I’m sorry. It’s not my place to ask.’
‘No, that’s quite all right, Sergeant,’ da Prè said. ‘They tried, but they didn’t get a lira.’ A smirk filled his face, and he added, ‘No one who tried to get anything from her estate succeeded.’
Vianello smiled broadly to show his joy at this narrow avoidance of disaster. Propping his elbow on the arm of his chair and his chin on his palm, he settled in to hear the tale of Signor da Prè’s triumph.
The little man pushed himself back in his own chair until his legs were almost completely parallel with the seat. ‘She always had a weakness for religion,’ he began. ‘Our parents sent her to convent schools. I think that’s why she never married.’ Brunetti glanced at da Prè’s hands, gripped atop the arms of his chair, but there was no sign of a wedding ring.
‘We never got along,’ he said simply. ‘She had her interest in religion. And I had mine in art.’ By which, Brunetti assumed, he meant enamelled snuff boxes.
‘When our parents died, they left this apartment to us jointly. But we couldn’t live together.’ Vianello nodded here, suggesting how difficult it was to live with a woman. ‘So I sold her my share. Twenty-three years ago. And I bought a smaller apartment. I needed the money to add to my collection.’ Again, Vianello nodded, this time in understanding of the many demands of art.
‘Then, three years ago, she fell and broke her hip, and it wouldn’t heal right, so there was no choice but to put her in the casa di cura.’ He stopped speaking here, an old man thinking about the things that made the nursing home inescapable. ‘She asked me to move in here to keep an eye on her things,’ he continued, ‘but I refused. I didn’t know if she’d come back, and then I’d have to move out again. And I didn’t want to have to move the collection in here – I wouldn’t live anywhere without it – and then move it again, should she recover. Too risky, too much chance of breaking something.’ Da Prè’s hands gripped tighter in unconscious terror at this possibility.
Brunetti found that, as the story progressed, he too began to nod in agreement with Signor da Prè, drawn into the lunatic world where a broken lid was a greater tragedy than a broken hip.
‘Then, when she died, she named me her heir, but she tried to give them a hundred million. She’d added that to her will while she was there.’
‘What did you do?’ Vianello asked.
‘I took it to my lawyer,’ da Prè answered instantly. ‘He had me declare that her mind was unsound during the last months of her life – that’s when she signed that thing.’
‘And?’ Vianello prompted.
‘It was thrown out, of course,’ the little man said with great pride. ‘The judges listened to me. It was lunacy on Augusta’s part. So they denied the bequest.’
‘And you inherited everything?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Of course,’ da Prè answered shortly. ‘There’s no one else in the immediate family.’
‘Was her mind unsound?’ Vianello asked.
Da Prè glanced over at the sergeant and answered immediately. ‘Of course not. She was as lucid as she ever was, right up to the last time I saw her, the day before she died. But the bequest was insane.’
Brunetti wasn’t sure he understood the distinction, but instead of seeking clarification, he asked, ‘Did the people at the nursing home appear to know about the bequest?’
‘What do you mean?’ da Prè asked suspiciously.
‘Did anyone from there ask you about the will, or did they oppose your decision to have the bequest denied?’
‘One of them called me before the funeral and asked to give a sermon during the mass. I told him there wasn’t going to be any sermon. Augusta had left instructions in the will about the funeral, wanted a requiem mass, so there was no way I could get around that. But she didn’t say anything specific about a sermon, so at least I stopped them from standing up there and prattling on about another world where all the happy souls will meet again.’ Da Prè smiled here; it was not a pretty smile.
‘One of them came to her funeral,’ he went on. ‘Big man, fat. He came up to me after it and said how great a loss Augusta had been to the “community of Christians”.’ The sarcasm with which da Prè pronounced the words scalded the air around him. ‘Then he said something about how generous she had always been, what a good friend she had been to the order.’ Da Prè stopped talking here and his mind seemed to wander away in pleased recollection of the scene.
‘What did you say?’ Vianello finally asked.
‘I told him the generosity was going into the grave with her,’ da Prè said with another bleak smile.
Neither Vianello nor Brunetti said anything for a moment, and then Brunetti asked, ‘Did they take any legal action?’
‘Against me, do you mean?’ da Prè asked.
Brunetti nodded.
‘No. Nothing.’ Da Prè was silent for a moment and then added, ‘Just because they got their hands on her, that doesn’t mean they could get their hands on her money.’
‘Did she ever talk about this what you call “getting their hands on her”?’ Brunetti asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did she tell you that they were after her to give them her money?’
‘Tell me?’
‘Yes, did she ever say anything, while she was at the casa di cura, about their trying to get her to leave her money to them.’
‘I don’t know,’ da Prè answered.
Brunetti didn’t know how to ask. He left it for da Prè to explain, which he did. ‘It was my duty to go and see her every month, which was all the time I could afford, but we had nothing to say to one another. I’d bring her any post that had accumulated, but it was always just religious things: magazines, requests for money. I’d ask her how she was. But there was nothing we could talk about, so I’d leave.’
‘I see.’ Brunetti saw, getting to his feet; she had been there three years and had left everything to this brother who had been too busy to visit her more than once a month, no doubt occupied with his little boxes.
‘What’s this all about?’ da Prè asked before Brunetti could move away from him. ‘Are they going to try to contest the will?’ Da Prè started to say something else but stopped himself, and Brunetti thought he saw him begin to smile, but then the little man covered his mouth with his hand, and the moment was gone.
‘Nothing, really, Signore. Actually, we’re interested in someone who worked there.’
‘I can’t help you there. I didn’t know any of the staff.’
Vianello got to his feet and came to stand by Brunetti, the warmth of his previous conversation with da Prè serving to mitigate the badly disguised indignation which emanated from his superior.
Da Prè asked no more questions. He got to his feet and led the two men out of the room and then down the corridor to the door of the apartment. There, Vianello took his upraised hand and shook it, thanking him for having shown him the lovely snuff boxes. Brunetti, too, shook the upraised hand, but he gave no thanks and was the first one through the door.
Chapter Four
‘H
orrible little man, horrible little man,’ Brunetti heard Vianello muttering as they walked down the steps.
Outside, it was cooler, as though da Prè had stolen the warmth from the day. ‘Disgusting little man,’ Vianello continued. ‘He thinks he owns those boxes. The fool.’
‘What, Sergeant?’ Brunetti asked, not having followed Vianello’s leap of thought.
‘He thinks he owns those things, those stupid little boxes.’
‘I thought you liked them.’
‘God, no; I think they’re disgusting. My uncle had scores of them, and every time we went there, he insisted on making me look at them. He was just the same, acquiring things, and things, and things, and believing he owned them.’
‘Didn’t he?’ Brunetti asked, pausing at a corner the better to hear what Vianello was saying.
‘Of course he owned them,’ Vianello said, stopping in front of Brunetti. ‘That is, he paid for them, had the receipts, could do with them whatever he wanted. But we never really own anything, do we?’ he asked, looking directly at Brunetti.
‘I’m not sure what you mean, Vianello.’
‘Think about it, sir. We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them.’ Vianello shook his head, frustrated by the difficulty he had in explaining what he thought was a relatively simple idea. ‘Just think of da Prè. Long after he’s dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It’s stupid to believe we own them. And it’s sinful for them to be so important.’
Brunetti knew the sergeant to be as godless and irreverent as he was himself, knew that the only religion he had was family and the sanctity of the ties of blood, and so it was strange to hear him speak of sin or define things in terms of it.
‘And how could he leave his own sister in a place like that for three years and visit her once a month?’ Vianello asked, as if he actually believed the question could admit an answer.