by Donna Leon
‘Doing that to that poor woman.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Getting her to tell me about her mother and the way she prayed the rosary.’ Then, after a moment and with deadly seriousness, ‘What a monster.’
‘That poor thing?’ Brunetti asked, nodding his head back towards the closed door to the palazzo.
‘No, the mother.’
23
Deciding she needed something to drink, Brunetti helped Griffoni to stand and waited while she steadied herself. At her nod, he latched his arm in hers, and they set off together. They turned to the right, crossed the bridge, then went into the bar. Luckily, a small table at the back was free. ‘A chamomile,’ she said in response to his look: Brunetti went back to the bar and asked for the tea and a coffee, then changed it to two pots of tea. His mother had said it was good for emergencies, and this seemed close to being one.
He went back to the table. He heard the swish of steam, the clatter of crockery, and soon the waitress brought their teas. He put her teabag into the pot, then did the same with his own. He added two packets of sugar to Griffoni’s cup, ignoring her protest that she didn’t want any, and two to his own.
Her face was stiff, the way the kids’ used to be when they first went walking, then skiing, in the mountains. He decided hers would thaw: it just took time and a warm place.
He picked up his cup and blew at the surface then stirred it a few times, and blew on it again: she mirrored his actions. Finally he chanced it and took a small sip: still hot but no longer boiling. He set the cup down and began to stir it again. When the temperature was right, Brunetti said, ‘Tell me.’
She sipped at her tea a few times, then added more to the cup without adding more sugar, as if to show him how she liked it. Another sip. Then she said, ‘“Purity”. That was the word that set her off, I think. Her mother was mad for it. Baths, hand-washing, clean clothing twice a day. They had maids, so they could do that. Then,’ she continued, pausing to drink more tea, ‘when they got older, she started talking to them about a different type of purity. There was a nun living with them, and priests all over the place.’
Griffoni stopped speaking and finished her cup of tea. With undisguised exasperation, she demanded, ‘Why do people make such a mess of everything?’
Brunetti shrugged. He had never found an answer to that one.
‘When they got bigger, she sent them to a girls’ school in Ireland, but then she got sick – the mother – and Lucrezia had to come back and take care of her.’
‘Sick with what?’
‘I didn’t understand,’ she said and glanced at Brunetti, as if weighing how far she could go. ‘It sounded like one of those diseases rich women in novels get.’
‘And the father during all of this?’
‘I don’t know, really,’ Griffoni said, her confusion audible. ‘It’s as if he didn’t exist.’
‘How can you be the King of Copper and not exist?’
‘I don’t know,’ she repeated, her voice tight. ‘I asked her about him, but she said he never counted for anything: the company belonged to her mother’s family: he was in charge only because he married her. He was always away, working. They had mines everywhere, and he would go off to see them.’
To Brunetti, it sounded like the stories he had heard about the days of La Serenissima Repubblica, when the merchants who sailed with their fleets came home once a year, stayed long enough to unload and reload their cargos and impregnate their wives, and then off again in pursuit of gain.
Colour had returned to her face, and her voice had steadied. First Pucetti befriended Ana Cavanella and now Lucrezia Lembo had confided in Griffoni: was he trapped in a nest of vipers able to worm themselves into people’s sympathies? Was he another one?
Brunetti finished his tea and looked towards the bar, hoping to catch the waitress’ eye. Griffoni leaned her head back and closed her eyes, much in the manner of Lucrezia Lembo.
Then she opened them, tried to smile, and said, ‘I’m sorry, Guido. I just feel so sorry for her. For them all.’
‘It shouldn’t happen,’ Brunetti said, ‘that stupidity costs so much.’
This time, it was she who didn’t understand: he saw it in her face. ‘Her mother and her talk of purity,’ he said, and then, with no introduction, added, ‘The doctor who treated Ana Cavanella and her son said she never tried to get him any help: no tests, no teaching, nothing.’ He saw Griffoni’s astonishment. ‘He said she was so stupid she was ashamed of the fact that he was deaf. That she saw it as God’s punishment for her sin, so she let him grow up like an animal. And die like one.’
‘Is any of this enough to make you want to stop?’ she asked, waving her hand as if to take in the room, the palazzo across the bridge, Ana Cavanella, and her dead son.
‘No.’
‘What next, then?’ The eagerness with which she asked this pleased him.
‘We keep looking until we find something, I suppose,’ he said.
‘Good.’
Brunetti considered going back to the Questura for an hour to begin to hunt through the public record for further traces of the Copper King’s family but dismissed the idea. He could not invite Claudia Griffoni back to the house and tell his wife that they would be working on the computer for a while and she should just go about making dinner, perhaps set an extra plate for their guest,
could he?
When he saw how exhausted Griffoni looked, he suggested they start the next morning, knowing she would agree. She did and stopped him from offering to take her home by saying she felt much better. ‘It was bad, but not terrible, doing that to her,’ she said. Then, trying to sound casual about it, she added, ‘It’s the part I dislike most: getting people to trust you and then using that to get things from them.’
‘It’s part of the job,’ Brunetti added, ‘though I don’t like it, either.’
They walked slowly towards the imbarcadero. She stopped and faced him to say, ‘Sometimes, though, with the bad ones, there’s satisfaction in it.’ When Brunetti remained impassive, she added, ‘It’s hard at times, especially with the younger officers, to listen to them talk about the way people are victims of society or circumstances
or their families.’
‘What about Lucrezia Lembo?’ Brunetti couldn’t stop himself from asking, though there was no evidence that she was bad in any way, just weak and unstable.
She smiled. ‘I set myself up for that one, didn’t I?’
‘Yes.’
She started towards the Accademia stop again. ‘I meant the ones who beat up their girlfriends or kill or rob someone and then kick him in the face just to show how tough they are. Those are the ones.’
Brunetti agreed with her but said nothing. They heard her boat approaching and hurried on to the covered dock. He patted her arm a few times and waited while she got on, then turned and went to the other dock to wait for his own boat.
He woke and looked out the window of their bedroom; the moral hangover from the evening before glowered back at him from the grey clouds hanging motionless over the city. He turned aside, but Paola was not there, and when he stretched out a hand under the covers – complimenting himself on his instincts as a policeman – he felt that her place was cold. He looked at the clock: almost nine.
Pyjama-clad, he went into the kitchen but found no one. The only sign of life was a coffee cup in the sink and the Moka still on the stove. Like Paola’s place in their bed, it was cold. He rinsed it out, put in water and coffee, and set it back on a low flame. From the window that looked at the far-off Dolomites, he saw that the clouds stretched all the way up there, darkening in the distance.
Was this what it would be like if he were single, if he lived alone and had never married? Paola’s grandmother’s china would not be in the cabinets, there would be no Canaletto on the wall, nor would the corner of the counter display the herd of ceramic statues of animals that Chiara had been bringing home for years. No yellow duck, no pink elepha
nt, nor giraffe, nor family of penguins. Liberation from these thoughts came from the bubbling noise of the Moka. He took the cup from the sink, poured in the coffee, and added sugar.
An hour later, he and Griffoni sat in front of Brunetti’s new computer, a copy of the late King of Copper’s carta d’identità on the screen before them: Ludovico Fadalti. ‘I thought his name was Lembo,’ Griffoni said. ‘Not Fadalti.’ She put her finger on the screen, almost as if she thought Brunetti incapable of reading the name printed there.
‘She told you the company was the mother’s, didn’t she?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes, she did. But the company is called Lembo.’
Brunetti hit a key, and a new carta d’identità appeared: same date and place of birth, same photo, but the surname was now ‘Lembo’.
‘He had it changed,’ Brunetti said. He had never heard of anyone actually doing this and was curious about how much the man born Fadalti had been willing to renounce on his path to becoming the King of Copper. ‘The children could then be called by the mother’s name.’
He looked at the other documents they had accessed: birth and death certificates, driver’s licence, marriage certificate, health system registration. Lembo had had no travel pass, as these had been initiated only a few years ago, but perhaps wealthy men in their eighties were not given to taking the vaporetto. His passport had been registered and re-registered up until four years before his death, and his bank accounts and credit cards had been closed only after his death.
On all official documents, beginning soon after the marriage, his name was given as Lembo. He recalled Lucrezia’s birth certificate: he could not remember having seen any sign of ‘Fadalti’ there, so the metamorphosis had been complete before her birth.
He retrieved her birth certificate, then the wedding certificate of her parents. Same year, yes, but only six months apart. He nudged Griffoni and pointed to the two dates.
‘Mamma mia,’ she said. ‘Even in dissolute Naples, that sort of thing wasn’t common sixty years ago – certainly not among people of their class.’
‘Even less so here,’ Brunetti added.
Official sources exhausted, he went back to Google and put in the name Ludovico Lembo. Pages of articles appeared, though when he read quickly through the listings, he saw that although in many his name appeared, they didn’t centre on him. He began a new search, using Ludovico Fadalti, but there was no reference in the press to a church wedding: no basilica, bride arriving in a white gondola, blessing by the Patriarch. A few subsequent articles reported on the early years of Lucrezia’s wild ride through life, listing Ludovico only because he was her father.
They found a few articles about him, when he was still Ludovico Fadalti: son of a Venetian engineer, only child, degree from the University of Padova. There were a number of articles about Lembo Minerals that provided information about the company and its success under the ‘dynamic direction’ of Ludovico who-knew-when-his-name-had-become-Lembo the engineer whose ‘skills and initiative’ gave direction to a traditional company while maintaining the ‘family-centred concepts’ that had propelled its success during the early years of the century. The earliest of these articles, it seemed, had been written years after the ‘dynamic’ new path had been set for the company. There was a meagre record of the early years of Lembo’s – Brunetti decided he might as well give in and call him that – leadership. There were references to the honours he later received from business and industrial organizations, culminating in his nomination, two years before he left the company, as ‘Cavaliere del Lavoro’.
Starting in the mid-1970s, articles began to appear about the women in the family, featuring the haughty Signora Lembo and her two beautiful daughters. Seeing them posed in photo after photo, the mother’s arms encircling her teenaged daughters in a gesture redolent of love, Brunetti thought of the Mother of the Gracchi, she too glowing with pride as she displayed her jewels. Signora Lembo, he learned, was distinguished by her intense faith and ceaseless good works in the cause of Holy Mother Church. There was even a photo of her kneeling, unrecognizable in a black veil, head bowed over the extended hand of the Pope.
Then, slowly, during the next decade, the articles disappeared, replaced by articles about the woman, no longer young, whom they had apparently decided to call ‘The Princess of Copper’.
He stood to stretch his back, leaving the computer to Griffoni. She continued reading while he walked over to the window, bent to feel the radiator, which was still cold, and began to study the figures in the campo on the other side of the canal.
The father, he realized, was yet another disappearing person, though this one had given up only his name. Was it worth it, in order to become King of Copper, and what was the rest of the price? To marry the woman whom the gutter press presented as a saint? His first-born daughter had married a gigolo half her age and was now cushioning her final years with drugs or drink. The second had gone off to God-haunted Ireland to study and work, apparently to settle there. The last-born had died at twenty, and her mother had decamped soon after, leaving the former King of Copper, in his eighties, with a new companion, to die on the Giudecca.
He turned back towards Griffoni and watched her work for a minute or two. She had become enthralled in the search for information: nothing else was. Brunetti was too far away to be able to read the screen, but he could see each page flash up, flash away, only to be replaced by another, and then another.
At last she pulled her hands away from the keys and turned towards him. ‘Most of the articles about the parents are public relations nonsense. Worthless. Especially the obituaries.’
‘Only saints die,’ Brunetti said.
‘What?’
‘Only saints die. In obituaries, everyone is a saint; everything else is washed away.’
‘I’m afraid you’re right,’ she said and killed the page. ‘What do you suggest we do?’
He waved a hand at the computer. ‘Why don’t we take a look in there for the name of someone who might
have known them?’
24
That took some time. Brunetti finally, after explaining that he and Commissario Griffoni needed her help, enlisted Signorina Elettra to access the records of the state pension fund, where she found the names of two former employees of the Lembo family, a maid and a man whose job was listed as ‘major-domo’. But the man had arrived after Lucrezia’s marriage, so he would know nothing of the early history of either the marriage or the company.
The maid, however, had worked for the Lembo family all the time that Ana Cavanella had been there and had then remained on for another thirty years. Griffoni sat opposite him, with between them some sheets of paper that Signorina Elettra had delivered. Brunetti, while appearing to pay no attention, had been acutely conscious of the way the two women dealt with each other during Signorina Elettra’s brief apparition in the room and, like those seeking Signs of Peace from Heaven, had seen them.
‘So the maid would have seen it all,’ he remarked to Griffoni.
‘One trembles at the thought of what that might have been,’ Griffoni answered.
‘Perhaps,’ he began, reaching forward and picking up one of the papers, ‘. . . Maria Annunziata Ghezzi can
tell us.’
Maria Annunziata Ghezzi, it turned out, lived down towards the end of Castello, behind San Francesco della Vigna, and was easy to find in the phone book. She answered Brunetti’s phone call with her name, and when he spoke to her in Veneziano, answered readily. Yes, she had worked for the Lembo family. No, she was no longer in touch with them, aside from receiving her pension, and that came from the state, not from them.
Brunetti asked her if she would be willing to talk to him. ‘It’s about that boy who died, isn’t it?’ she replied.
‘Davide Cavanella?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Ana’s boy.’
‘Yes, Signora. It is.’
There followed a long silence; Brunetti chose not to break it. Finally she said
, ‘Then you better come here, and we’ll talk.’
He debated, but for only an instant, the wisdom of taking Griffoni with him. Against her failure to speak Veneziano, he weighed her femininity and the ease of her presence. ‘Feel like a walk?’ he asked.
‘Let me go and get my coat.’
On the way there, they talked about her investigation of the fire in the factory. ‘No one saw anything. No one heard anything,’ Griffoni said.
‘You sound as if you don’t believe it,’ Brunetti said.
She paused at the bottom of the bridge that led to San Francesco. ‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘The fire started inside the factory. It had been broken into years ago, and people used it. I don’t want to know what they used it for. It looks as if it started in a room where old paint and rags were stored.’
Years ago, Brunetti would have interjected here, ‘or put’, but time had taught him to control the impulse to insert trouble where it was not at first found. He had not read the report of the arson squad, and if ‘stored’ was good enough for them, it was good enough for him. From the very first suggestion, at a city council meeting – it must have been six years ago – that the building was suitable for transformation into a hotel, Brunetti had been interested only in how it would be brought to pass.
They continued towards Signora Grezzi’s address. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Griffoni said.
‘Always a dangerous thing for a woman,’ Brunetti replied flatly.
As if he had not spoken, she said, ‘About how we’re always being made conscious of our regional differences: dialect, food, customs, even our appearance.’ This came from a Neapolitan who was a clear-eyed blonde almost as tall as he.
‘And then I think about the way no one is going to bother to investigate this fire or go to the trouble of finding out what might have caused it. If anything did cause it. Deliberately, I mean.’
‘And your point?’
‘That those differences of dialect and food and customs are all meaningless.’