Acqua Alta

by Donna Leon

  ‘Would it help if I had my father-in-law call and ask your father about this?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘And who is your father-in-law?’ Scattalon asked.

  ‘Count Orazio Falier,’ Brunetti said, savouring, for the first time in his life, the rich sound of each syllable as it fell trippingly from his tongue.

  Again, the sound at the other end grew muffled, but Brunetti could still make out the deep rumble of male voices. The phone was set down on a hard surface, he heard noises in the background, and then another voice spoke, ‘Buon giorno, Dottor Brunetti. You must excuse my son. He’s new to the business. A university graduate, so perhaps he isn’t familiar with the trade, not yet.’

  ‘Of course, Signor Scattalon. I understand completely.’

  ‘What information was it you said you needed, Dottor Brunetti?’ Scattalon asked.

  ‘I’d like a rough estimate of how much Signor La Capra has spent on the restoration of his palazzo.’

  ‘Of course, Dottore, of course. Let me just get the file.’ The phone was set down again, but Scattalon was quickly back. He said he didn’t know how much the original purchase price had been, but he estimated that, during the last year, his company had charged La Capra at least five hundred million, including both labour and materials. Brunetti assumed that this was the price ‘in bianco’, the official price that would be reported to the government as what had been spent and earned. He didn’t know Scattalon well enough to feel himself free to ask about this, but it was a safe conclusion that a great deal, perhaps the major part, of the work had been paid for ‘in nero’, unofficially and at a cheaper rate, the better for Scattalon to avoid having to declare it as income and hence be forced to pay taxes on it. Brunetti considered it a safe assumption that he could factor in another five hundred million lire, if not for Scattalon, then for other workers and expenses that would have been paid ‘in nero’.

  As to what had actually been done in the palazzo, Scattalon was more than forthcoming. New roof and ceilings, structural reinforcement with steel beams (and the fine paid for that), all walls stripped down to the original brick and re-plastered, new plumbing and wiring, a complete heating system, central air conditioning, three new stairways, parquet floors in the central salons, and double-glazed windows throughout. No expert, Brunetti could still calculate that this work would cost enormously more than the sum Scattalon had quoted. Well, that was between Scattalon and the tax people.

  ‘I thought he was planning a room where he could put his collection,’ Brunetti fabricated. ‘Did you work on that, a room for paintings or,’ and here he hoped as he paused, ‘ceramics?’

  After a brief hesitation during which Scattalon must have been weighing his obligation to La Capra against that to the Count, he said, ‘There was one room on the third floor that might have served as a kind of gallery. We put bullet-proof glass and iron gratings on all the windows,’ Scattalon continued. ‘It’s at the back of the palazzo, and the windows face north, so it gets indirect light, but the windows are large enough to allow a fair amount to come in.’

  ‘A gallery?’

  ‘Well, he never said that, but it would certainly seem that’s what it is. Only one door, reinforced with steel, and he had us cut a number of indentations in the wall. They would be perfect for showing statues, so long as they were small, or perhaps for ceramics.’

  ‘What about an alarm system? Did you install one?’

  ‘No, we didn’t, but that’s not work we’re prepared to do. If he had it done, he would have had to hire a different company.’

  ‘Do you know if he did?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘What sort of man did he seem to you, Signor Scattalon?’

  ‘A wonderful man to work for. Very reasonable. And very inventive. He has excellent taste.’

  Brunetti understood this to mean that La Capra was extravagant, probably given to the sort of extravagance that did not quibble over bills or examine them too closely.

  ‘Do you know if Signor La Capra is living in the palazzo now?’

  ‘Yes, he is. In fact, he’s called us in a few times to take care of details that were overlooked in the last weeks of work.’ Ah, Brunetti thought, the ever-useful passive voice: the details had been ‘overlooked’; Scattalon’s workmen had not overlooked them. What a wondrous thing was language.

  ‘And do you know if any details were overlooked in the room you call the gallery?’

  Scattalon’s answer was immediate. ‘I didn’t call it that, Dottor Brunetti. I said it might serve that function. And, no, there were no details overlooked there.’

  ‘Do you know if your workmen had reason to go into that room when they went back to the palazzo for the last pieces of work?’

  ‘If there was no work to be done in the room, then there would be no reason for my men to enter it, so I’m sure they would not.’

  ‘Of course, of course, Signor Scattalon. I’m sure that’s true.’ His sense of the conversation suggested that Scattalon had patience for one more question, no more. ‘Is the door the only means of access to that room?’

  ‘Yes. That, and the air-conditioning duct.’

  ‘And do the gratings open?’

  ‘No.’ Simple, monosyllabic, and quite audibly terminal.

  ‘Thank you for your help, Signor Scattalon. I’ll be sure to mention it to my father-in-law.’ Brunetti concluded, giving no more explanation at the end of the conversation than he had at the beginning but reasonably certain that Scattalon, like most Italians, would be sufficiently suspicious of anything having to do with a police investigation not to mention it to anyone, most assuredly not to a client who might not yet have paid him in full.

  * * * *

  Chapter Nineteen

  Would signor La Capra, he wondered, turn out to be yet another of those well-protected men who were appearing on the scene with unsettling frequency? Rich, but with a wealth that had no roots, at least none that were traceable, they seemed to be moving north, coming up from Sicily and Calabria, immigrants in their own land. For years, people in Lombardy and the Veneto, the wealthiest parts of the country, had thought themselves free from la piovra, the many-tentacled octopus that the Mafia had become. It was all roba dal Sud, stuff from the South, those killings, the bombings of bars and restaurants whose owners refused to pay protection money, the shoot-outs in city centres. And, he had to admit, as long as it had remained, all that violence and blood, down in the South, no one had felt much concern with it; the government had shrugged it off as just another quaint custom of the meridione. But in the last few years, just like an agricultural blight that couldn’t be stopped, the violence had moved north: Florence, Bologna, and now the heartland of industrialized Italy found themselves infected and looked in vain for a way to contain the disease.

  Along with the violence, along with the hired killers who shot twelve-year-olds as messages to their parents, had come the men with the briefcases, the soft-spoken patrons of the opera and the arts, with their university-educated children, their wine cellars and their fierce desire to be perceived as patrons, epicures and gentlemen, not as the thugs they were, prating and posturing with their talk of omerta and loyalty.

  For a moment, he had to stop himself and accept the fact that Signor La Capra might well be no more than what he appeared to be: a man of wealth who had bought and restored a palazzo on the Grand Canal. But even as he thought this, he thought of the presence of Salvatore La Capra’s fingerprints in Semenzato’s office and saw again the names of those cities and the identical dates when La Capra and Semenzato had visited them. Coincidence? Absurd.

  Scattalon had said La Capra was living in the palazzo; perhaps it was time for a representative of one of the official arms of the city to greet the new resident and have a word with him about the need for security in these sadly criminal times.

  Since the palazzo was on the same side of the Grand Canal as his home, he had lunch there but had no coffee after it, thinking that Signor La Capra mi
ght be polite enough to offer it to him.

  * * * *

  The palazzo stood at the end of Calle Dilera, a small street that dead-ended into the Grand Canal. As he approached, Brunetti could see the sure signs of newness. The exterior layer of intonaco plastered over the bricks from which the walls were constructed was still virgin and free of graffiti. Only near the bottom did it show the first signs of wear: the recent acqua alta, had left its mark at about the height of Brunetti’s knee, lightening the dull orange of the plaster, some of which had already begun to crumble away and now lay kicked or swept to the side of the narrow calle. Iron gratings were cemented into place on the four ground-level windows and thus prevented all chance of entry. Behind them, he saw new wooden shutters, tightly closed. He moved to the other side of the narrow calle and put his head back to study the upper floors. All of them had the same dark green wooden shutters, these thrown back, and windows of double-glazed glass. The gutters that hung under the new terracotta tiles of the roof were copper, as were the pipes that carried the run-off water from them. At the second floor, however, the pipes changed to far less tempting tin and ran down to the ground.

  The nameplate by the single bell was taste itself: a simple italic script with only the name, ‘La Capra’. He rang the bell and stood near the intercom.

  ‘Si, chi è ?’ a male voice asked.

  ‘Polizia,’ he answered, having decided not to waste time with subtlety.

  ‘Si. Arrivo,’ the voice said, and then Brunetti heard only a mechanical click. He waited.

  After a few minutes, the door was opened by a young man in a dark blue suit. Clean-shaven and dark-eyed, he was handsome enough to be a model but perhaps a bit too stocky to photograph well. ‘Si?’ he asked, not smiling but not seeming any more unfriendly than the average citizen would be if asked to come to the door by the police.

  ‘Buon giorno,’ Brunetti said. ‘I’m Commissario Brunetti; I’d like to speak to Signor La Capra.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About crime in the city.’

  The young man remained where he was, standing a bit outside the door, and made no move to open it or allow Brunetti to enter. He waited for Brunetti to explain more fully, and when it became obvious this was not about to happen, he said, ‘I thought there wasn’t supposed to be any crime in Venice.’ His Sicilian accent became audible in the longer sentence, his belligerence in the tone.

  ‘Is Signor La Capra at home?’ Brunetti asked, tired of sparring and beginning to feel the cold.

  ‘Yes.’ The young man stepped back inside the door and held it open for Brunetti. He found himself in a large courtyard with a circular well in the centre. Off to the left, marble pillars supported a flight of steps that led up to the first floor of the building that enclosed the courtyard on all sides. At the top, the stairs turned back upon themselves, still hugging the exterior wall of the building, and climbed to the second and then the third floor. The carved heads of stone lions stood at equal distances on the marble banister that ran along the stairs. Tucked below the stairs were the signs of recent work: a wheelbarrow filled with paper bags of cement, a roll of heavy-duty plastic sheeting, and large tins dripping different colours of paint down their sides.

  At the top of the first flight of steps, the young man opened a door and stepped back to allow Brunetti to pass into the palazzo. The moment he stepped inside, Brunetti heard music filtering down from the floors above. As he followed the young man up the steps, the sound grew louder, until he could distinguish the presence of a single soprano voice in the midst of it. The accompaniment, it seemed, was strings, but the sound was muffled, coming from another part of the house. The young man opened another door, and just at that moment the voice soared up above the instruments and hung suspended in beauty for the space of five heartbeats, then dropped back to the lesser world of the instruments.

  They passed down a marble hallway and started up an inner stairway, and as they went, the music grew louder and louder, the voice clearer and brighter, the nearer they came to its source. The young man seemed not to hear, though the world in which they moved was filled only with that sound, nothing more. At the top of the second flight of stairs, the young man opened another door and stood back again, nodding Brunetti into a long corridor. He could only nod; there was no way Brunetti could have heard him.

  Brunetti walked in front of him and along the corridor. The young man caught up with him and opened a door on the right; this time he bowed as Brunetti passed in front of him and closed the door behind him, leaving Brunetti inside, all but deafened by the music.

  Robbed of every sense but sight, Brunetti saw in four corners wide cloth-covered panels that reached from the floor to the height of a man, all turned to face the centre of the room. And there in the centre, a man lay on a chaise-longue covered with pale brown leather. His attention entirely given to a small square booklet in his hands, he gave no sign that he had noticed Brunetti’s entrance. Brunetti stopped just inside the door and watched him. And he listened to the music.

  The soprano’s tone was absolutely pure, a sound that was generated in the heart and warmed there until it came swelling out with the apparent effortlessness that was achieved only by the greatest singers and then only with the greatest skill. Her voice paused upon a note, soared off from it, swelled, flirted with what he now realized was a harpsichord, and then rested for a moment while the strings spoke with the harpsichord. And then, as if it had always been there, the voice returned and swept the strings up with it, higher and higher still. Brunetti could make out words and phrases here and there, ‘disprezzo’, ‘perch è ’, ‘per pietade’, ‘fugge il mio bene’, all of which spoke of love and longing and loss. Opera, then, though he had no idea which one it was.

  The man on the chaise-longue looked to be in his late fifties and wore around his middle proof of good eating and soft living. His face was dominated by his nose, large and fleshy — the same nose Brunetti had seen on the mug shot of the accused rapist, his son — on which sat a pair of half-lens reading glasses. His eyes were large, limpid and dark enough to seem almost black. He was cleanshaven, but his beard was so heavy that a dark shadow was evident on his cheeks, though it was still early afternoon.

  The music came to a chilling diminuendo and died away. It was only in the silence that radiated out to him that Brunetti became aware of just how perfect the quality of sound had been, the volume disguised by that perfection.

  The man leaned back limply on his chaise-longue, and the booklet fell from his hand to the floor beside him. He closed his eyes, head back, his entire body slack. Though he had in no way acknowledged Brunetti’s arrival, Brunetti had no doubt the man was very much aware of his presence in the room; moreover, he had the feeling that this display of aesthetic ravishment was being put on specifically for his edification.

  Gently, much in the manner his mother-in-law used to applaud an aria she hadn’t liked but had been told was very well sung, he patted the tips of his fingers together a few times, very lightly.

  As if called back from realms where lesser mortals dared not enter, the man on the chaise-longue opened his eyes, shook his head in feigned astonishment, and turned to look at the source of the lukewarm response.

  ‘Didn’t you like the voice?’ La Capra asked with real surprise.

  ‘Oh, I liked the voice a great deal,’ Brunetti answered, then added, ‘but the performance seemed a bit forced.’

  If La Capra caught the absence of possessive pronoun, he chose to ignore it. He picked up the libretto and waved it in the air. ‘That was the best voice of our age, the only great singer,’ he said, waving the small libretto for emphasis.

  ‘Signora Petrelli?’ Brunetti inquired.

  The man’s mouth twisted up as if he’d bitten into something unpleasant. ‘Sing Handel? La Petrelli?’ he asked with tired surprise. ‘All she can sing is Verdi and Puccini.’ He pronounced the names as a nun would say “sex” and “passion”.

  Brunetti began t
o offer that Flavia also sang Mozart, but instead he asked, ‘Signor La Capra?’

  At the sound of his name, the man pushed himself to his feet, suddenly recalled from aesthetic pronouncements to his duty as a host, and approached Brunetti, extending his hand. ‘Yes. And whom do I have the honour of meeting?’

  Brunetti took his hand and returned the very formal smile. ‘Commissario Guido Brunetti.’

  ‘Commissario?’ One would think La Capra had never heard the word.

  Brunetti nodded. ‘Of the police.’

  Momentary confusion crossed the other man’s face, but this time Brunetti thought it might be a real emotion, not one manufactured for an audience. La Capra quickly recovered and asked, very politely, ‘And what is it, if I might ask, that brings you to visit me, Commissario?’

  Brunetti didn’t want La Capra to suspect that the police connected him with Semenzato’s death, so he had decided to say nothing about his son’s fingerprints having been found at the scene of Semenzato’s murder. And until he had a better sense of the man, he didn’t want La Capra to know the police were curious about any link that might exist between him and Brett. ‘Theft, Signor La Capra,’ Brunetti said and then repeated, ‘Theft.’