by Donna Leon
‘Afraid I’d drown?’ Brunetti asked.
Bonsuan broke in. ‘More likely the cholera would get you.’
‘Cholera?’ Brunetti asked, laughing at his exaggeration, the first joke he’d ever heard Bonsuan attempt.
Bonsuan swung his head around and gave Brunetti a level glance. ‘Cholera,’ he repeated.
When Bonsuan turned back to the wheel, Vianello and Brunetti stared at one another like guilty schoolboys, and Brunetti had the impression that it was with difficulty that Vianello stopped himself from laughing.
‘When I was a boy,’ Bonsuan said with no introduction, ‘I used to swim in front of my house. Just dive into the water from the side of the Canale di Cannaregio. You could see to the bottom. You could see fish, crabs. Now all you see is mud and shit.’
Vianello and Brunetti exchanged another glance.
‘Anyone who eats a fish from out of that water is crazy.’ Bonsuan said.
Late last year, there had been numerous cases of cholera reported, but in the south, where that sort of thing happened. Brunetti remembered that the health authorities had closed the fish market in Bari and warned the local people to avoid eating fish, which had seemed to him like telling cows to avoid eating grass. The autumn rains and floods had driven the story from the pages of the national newspapers, but not before Brunetti had begun to wonder whether the same thing was possible, here in the north, and how wise it was to eat anything that came from the increasingly putrid waters of the Adriatic.
When the boat pulled up at the gondola stop to the left of Palazzo Dario, Vianello grabbed the end of a coiled rope and leaped onto the dock. Leaning back, he held the rope taut and the boat close to the dock as Brunetti stepped ashore.
‘You want me to wait for you, sir?’ Bonsuan asked.
‘No, don’t bother. I don’t know how long we’ll be,’ Brunetti told him. ‘You can go back.’
Bonsuan raised a hand languidly toward the peak of his uniform cap, a gesture that served as both salute and farewell. He slipped the motor into reverse and arched the boat out into the canal, not bothering to look back at the two men who stood on the landing.
‘Where first?’ Vianello asked.
‘Dorsoduro 723. It’s up near the Guggenheim, on the left.’
The men walked up the narrowcalle and turned right at the first intersection. Brunetti found himself still wanting a coffee, then surprised that there were no bars to be seen on either side of the street.
An old man walking his dog came toward them, and Vianello moved behind Brunetti to give them room to pass, though they continued to talk about what Bonsuan had said. ‘You really think the water is that bad, sir?’ Vianello asked.
‘Yes.’
‘But some people still swim in the Canale della Giudecca,’ Vianello insisted.
‘When?’
‘Redentore.’
‘They’re drunk, then,’ Brunetti said dismissively.
Vianello shrugged and then stopped when Brunetti did.
‘I think this is it,’ Brunetti said, pulling the paper from his pocket. ‘Da Pr è ,’ he said aloud, looking at the names engraved on the two neat rows of brass plates that stood to the left of the door.
Who is it?’ Vianello asked.
‘Ludovico, heir to Signorina da Prè. Could be anyone. Cousin. Brother. Nephew.’
‘How old was she?’
‘Seventy-two,’ Brunetti answered, remembering the neat columns on Maria Testa’s list.
‘What did she die of?’
‘Heart attack.’
‘Any suspicion that this person,’ Vianello began, nodding with his chin toward the brass plate beside the door, ‘had anything to do with it?’
‘She left him this apartment and more than five hundred million lire.’
‘Does that mean that it’s possible?’ Vianello asked.
Brunetti, who had recently learned that the building in which they lived needed a new roof and that their share of it would be nine million lire, said, ‘If the apartment’s nice enough, I might kill someone to get it.’
Vianello, who knew nothing about the roof, gave his commissario a strange look.
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 Bru
netti 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 snuffboxes.’
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, nodded 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.