by Donna Leon
He raised his chin and devoted his full attention, and gaze, to Brunetti. 'Have I made myself clear, Cornmissario?'
'Excellently clear, sir’
'Good’ he said, taking Brunetti's affirmation as agreement that he would do as he was told. 'Then I won't keep you any longer. I have a meeting to attend.'
Brunetti murmured polite words and left the office. Outside, Signorina Elettra sat at her desk, reading a magazine; there was no sign of Vianello. When she looked up, Brunetti raised a finger and pointed at his nose, then upwards in the direction of his office. He heard Patta's door open behind him. Signorina Elettra glanced back at her magazine, ignoring Brunetti, and idly flipped a page. He left and went up to his office to wait for her.
Vianello was by the window of Brunetti's office when he arrived, standing on his toes and leaning out of the window, looking down at the dock in front of the Questura. Brunetti heard the motor of one of the launches start up, then listened as it pulled away and started down towards the Bacino and, presumably, off towards the Cipriani. Saying nothing, Vianello drew his head back inside and moved towards a chair.
A moment later Signorina Elettra came in and closed the door behind her. She took the chair next to Vianello; Brunetti leaned back against his desk.
He hardly thought it necessary to ask her if Vianello had told her what had to be done. 'Will you be able to check them all?' he asked.
'Only this one will be difficult,' she said, pointing to a name halfway down the list. 'Deutsche Bank. They've taken over two other banks, but their office here is new, and I've never had to ask them for anything, so it might take me some time, but I can make the requests to the others this afternoon: I should have the answers by tomorrow.' The way she phrased it, one not familiar with her tactics would assume that all of this would be done according to strict banking procedure: all information given in compliance with court orders which, in turn, had been supplied in response to police inquiries filed through the proper channels. Since this was a process which ordinarily took months and which new laws made increasingly difficult, if not impossible, the reality was that the information would be plucked from the files of the banks as effortlessly as the wallet from the back pocket of an unsuspecting Belgian tourist on the Number One vaporetto.
Looking at Vianello, Brunetti asked, 'What do you think?'
With a polite nod at Signorina Elettra to show that she had told him about Brunetti's conversation with Signora Gismondi, Vianello said, 'If the woman you spoke to is telling the truth, then it's not likely that Signora Ghiorghiu killed the old woman. Which means that someone else did, and I agree that these bank records are a good first place to look for a reason why.'
Signorina Elettra interrupted here. 'Do you think there's any chance that she might have been the murderer?'
Vianello glanced at him, equally curious, and Brunetti said, 'If you've seen the photos of Signora Battestini's body, you've seen what the blows did to her head.' Taking their silence for assent, he went on, 'It doesn't make any sense to me that the Ghiorghiu woman would go back and do that in cold blood. She had a lot of money, she had a train ticket home, and she was already at the station. And from what Signora Gismondi said, it sounds as though she'd had time to calm down. I can't see any reason why she'd go back and kill the old woman, and if she did, not in that way. That was rage, not calculation.'
'Or calculation disguised as rage,' suggested Vianello.
This opened vistas of malice Brunetti preferred not to contemplate, but he nodded in reluctant assent. Rather than speculate about the possible, however, he wanted them to discuss the actual, and so he turned his attention to Signorina Elettra. ‘I’ll talk to her lawyer tomorrow and to the relatives.' Turning to Vianello, he said, 'I'd like you to go and see if people in the neighbourhood remember seeing anything that day.'
'Is this official?' Vianello asked.
Brunetti sighed. ‘I think it would be better if you managed to make your questions casual, if such a thing is possible.'
'I'll ask Nadia if she knows anyone who lives over there,' Vianello said. 'Or maybe we'll go over there for a drink or have lunch in that new place on the corner of Campo dei Mori.'
Brunetti acknowledged Vianello's plan with a grin, then turned to Signorina Elettra and said, 'The other thing I'd like checked is any possible involvement she might have had with us.'
'Who? The Romanian?'
'No. Signora Battestini.'
'A master criminal in her eighties,' she chortled. 'How I'd love to discover one.'
Brunetti named a former Prime Minister and suggested she might begin by searching the files for information about him.
Vianello laughed outright and she had the grace to smile.
'And her husband and her late son while you're about it,' Brunetti said, returning them to the business at hand.
'Shall I have a look for the lawyer?' 'Yes.'
'I love to hunt for lawyers’ Signorina Elettra could not prevent herself from saying. 'They think they're so clever at hiding things, but it's so easy to flush them out of the undergrowth. Almost too easy.'
'Would you prefer to give them a sporting chance?' Vianello asked.
The question brought her back to her senses. 'Give a lawyer a sporting chance? Do you think I'm mad?'
9
Because he still had to read witness statements in the airport case and because he was not eager to talk to a lawyer, Brunetti contented himself with calling Avvocatessa Marieschi's office and making an appointment to speak to her the following morning. When the secretary asked what he wanted to discuss, Brunetti said only that it concerned a question of inheritance, gave his name, but made no mention of the fact that he worked for the police.
He spent an hour reading through contradictory and mutually exclusive statements. Luckily, a small photo was attached to each of them, so he could identify the person making the statement or answering the questions with the people he had observed on the videos from cameras hidden in the baggage hall of the airport. To the best of his understanding, only twelve of the seventy-six people arrested were telling the whole truth, for it was only their testimony that was confirmed by the hours of video he had watched in the last week, film which captured all of the accused taking part in thefts of some sort.
Brunetti was reluctant to invest much time in the investigation, especially since the defence was arguing that, since the cameras had been placed there without the knowledge of the people being filmed, they represented an invasion of the 'privacy' of the accused, that all-purpose word that had been hijacked from English to fill a need in a language which had no term of its own for the concept. If this argument were upheld, and he realized it might well be, then the state's case collapsed, for all those who had admitted guilt, with the disappearance of the primary evidence against them, would instantly retract their confessions.
Besides, they were all still at work, it having been argued that, since the Constitution guaranteed everyone the right to work, it would be unconstitutional to fire them. "The loony bin, the loony bin,' he whispered to himself and decided it was time to go home.
When he got there, he found that Paola had been as good as her word, for the aromas that met him as he entered the apartment were a rich blend of seafood, garlic, and something he wasn't sure about, perhaps spinach. He set the coin bag in which he had folded his dirty jacket by the door and went down the hall to the kitchen. She was already seated at the table, a glass of white wine in front of her, reading.
'All right’ he said, 'I'll ask you what you're reading.'
She glanced at him over her reading glasses and said, 'A book that should be of great interest to us both, Guido: Chiara's textbook on religious doctrine.'
Little good could come of this, Brunetti realized instantly, but still he asked, 'Why to us?'
'Because of what it tells us about the world we live in’ she said, setting the book down and taking a sip of wine.
'For example?' he asked, going to the refrigerator
and taking out the open bottle. It was the good Ribolla Gialla they'd bought from a friend in Corno di Rosazzo.
'There's a chapter here’ she said, pointing at the page she had been reading, 'on the Seven Deadly Sins.'
Brunetti had often thought that it was convenient that there should be one for each day of the week, but he kept this thought to himself for the moment. 'And?' he asked.
'And I started thinking about the way our society has ceased to think of them as sins or, if not all of them, has managed at least to remove most of the scent of sin that was once attached to them.'
He pulled out a chair and sat opposite her, not really interested in this latest observation but willing to listen. He raised his glass in her direction and took a sip. It was as good as he remembered its being. Thank God, then, for good wine and good friends, and thank God even for a wife who could find reason for polemic in a middle school textbook of religious doctrine.
'Think of lust,' she continued.
'I often do,' he said and leered.
Ignoring him, she went on. 'When we grew up, it was, if not a sin, at least a semi-sin, or at least something that one did not discuss or present in public. Now you can't look at a film or television or a magazine without seeing it.'
'Do you think that's bad?' he asked.
'Not necessarily. Just different. Maybe a better case is gluttony’
Ah, that was to strike a blow close to home, Brunetti thought, and pulled in his stomach a little.
'We're encouraged to it all the time. Every time we open a magazine or a newspaper.'
'Gluttony?' he asked, puzzled.
'Not gluttony for food, necessarily’ she said, 'but the taking in or consumption of more than we need. After all, what is owning more than one television or one car or one house but a form of gluttony?'
'I'd never thought of it that way’ he temporized and went back to the refrigerator for more wine.
'No, neither did I, not until I started to read this book. They define gluttony as eating too much and leave it at that, but I started thinking about what it would or could mean in larger terms.'
That, it seemed to Brunetti, was the essence of Paola, this woman he still loved to the point of distraction, that she was always thinking about things - everything, it sometimes seemed to him - in larger terms.
'Do you think you could start thinking about dinner in larger terms?' he asked.
She looked across at him, then at her watch, and saw that it was well after eight. 'Ah,' she said, as if surprised at being called back to such mundane things. 'Of course. I heard the kids come in.' Then, it seemed, she took her first look at him and asked, 'What did you do to your shirt? Wipe your hands on it?'
'Yes,' he said, and at her surprise added, 'I'll tell you after dinner.'
Both Chiara and Raffi were there, a rare enough event during the summer, when one or both of them was often away with friends for dinner, sometimes to spend the night. Raffi had reached an age when his puppy love for Sara Paganuzzi had taken on a far more adult tone, so much so that Brunetti had taken him aside one afternoon some months before and tried to talk to him about sex, only to be told that they'd learned all about that sort of thing at school. It was Paola who had made it clear, declaring the following night that, regardless of what his friends did or thought, she'd spoken to Sara's parents and they were all in agreement that he would not, under any circumstances, be allowed to spend the night at Sara's home, and Sara would not stay at theirs.
'But that's medieval’ Raffi had whined.
'It's also final’ Paola had said, putting an end to argument.
Whatever arrangement Raffi had worked out with Sara seemed to satisfy them both, for whenever she came to dinner she was polite and friendly to them all, and even Raffi seemed to bear his parents no ill-will for a policy most of his friends would certainly concur was 'medieval'.
Raffi and Chiara had both spent the day at the Alberoni, though with different groups of friends, and after a day of swimming and playing on the beach, they ate like field hands. It seemed, from the size of the platter Paola had covered with fish and shrimp, that she'd bought an entire swordfish. 'Are you going to eat a third portion?' Brunetti asked Raffi when he saw his son eyeing the almost empty platter.
'He's a growing boy, Papa’ Chiara surprised him by saying, thus suggesting that she was full.
Brunetti glanced at Paola, but she was busy helping herself to more spinach and missed the chance to appreciate the greatness of soul he displayed by failing to ask her if their son were guilty of gluttony. Turning back her attention, Paola said, 'Finish it, Raffi. Nobody likes cold fish.'
'If we were speaking English, would that be a pun, Mamma?' Chiara asked. Along with Paola's nose and lanky frame, Chiara had inherited her mother's passion for language, Brunetti knew, but this was the first time she'd branched out into making jokes in her second language.
By the time the ice-cream was finished, Chiara was almost asleep, so Paola sent both children to bed and started to gather the dishes. Brunetti carried the empty ice-cream bowl into the kitchen and stood at the counter, licking the serving spoon, then running it around the bottom of the bowl to pick up the last bits of peach. When there was no hopeful prospect of more, he set the bowl to the side of the sink and went back to the table to get the glasses.
When the dishes were soaking, Paola said, 'Do you think we should remain with the fruit theme and have a drop of Williams out on the terrace?'
'I'd probably starve to death without you to protect me,' Brunetti said.
'Guido, my dove,' she said, ‘I worry a great deal about the things that could happen to you because of your job, but, believe me, starving to death is not one of them.' She went out on to the terrace to wait for him.
He decided to bring only two glasses and leave the bottle behind. Besides, he could go back and get more if he chose. Outside, he found her in a chair, her feet propped up on the lowest rung of the railing, her eyes closed. As he drew near, she stretched out her hand, and he put the glass into it. She sipped, sighed, sipped again.
'God's in His heaven, all's right with the world,' she said in English.
'Perhaps you've already had enough to drink, Paola,' he observed.
'Tell me about the shirt,' she said, and he did.
'And you believe this woman, this Signora Gismondi?' she asked when Brunetti had finished telling her about the events of the day.
‘I think I do,' he said. 'There's no reason for her not to be telling the truth. Nothing she said suggested that she was anything but the old woman's neighbour.'
'With a grudge,' Paola suggested.
'Because of the television?' he asked.
'Yes.'
'You don't kill people because of the noise of a television,' he insisted.
She reached out and put her hand on his arm. 'I've been listening to you talk about your work, Guido, for decades, and it seems to me that there are a lot of people who are ready to kill for a lot less than the noise of a television.'
'For example?' he asked.
'Remember that man, was it in Mestre, who went outside to tell the guy in the car in front of his house to turn the radio down? When was it, about four years ago? He got killed, didn't he?'
'But that was a man,' Brunetti said. 'And he had a history of violence.'
'And your Signora Gismondi doesn't?'
That made Brunetti remember that he had not bothered to ask Signorina Elettra to see what she could find out about Signora Gismondi. ‘I hardly think that's likely’ he said.
'You probably wouldn't find anything, anyway,' Paola said.
'Then why doubt her?'
She sighed silently, then said, 'It's disappointing at times mat after all these years you still don't understand the way my mind works.'
‘I doubt I'll ever understand that’ Brunetti admitted with no attempt at irony. Then, 'What is it I don't understand now?'
'That I believe you're right about Signora Gismondi. There'd be no sense in
it: a person who is embarrassed when someone tries to kiss their hand in public.' It might be an inexact description of Signora Gismondi's remarks, and it seemed he might have few occasions to apply it, but this seemed as good a rule about human behaviour as Brunetti had ever heard.
'But I want you to be able to give proof to people like Patta and Scarpa and whoever else doesn't want to believe this.'