by Donna Leon
A recidivist, he opened hisGazzettino and turned his attention to the second section, dedicating himself to its many delights until the vaporetto pulled up at the Ca’ Rezzonico stop.
At the end of the long calle, he turned right in front of the church, then down into an ever narrowercalle until he found himself at the immense portone of Palazzo Falier. He rang the bell and stepped to the right, placing himself in front of the speaker to announce himself, but the door was opened almost instantly by Luciana, the oldest of the servants who staffed the palazzo and who had, by virtue of devotion and the passage of time, become an ancillary member of the family.
‘Ah, Dottor Guido,’ she said, smiling and putting her hand on his arm to lead him through the doorway. Her instinctive gesture expressed happiness to see him, concern for his well-being, and something close to love. ‘Paola? The children?’
Brunetti recalled that it was only a few years ago, when both children already towered over this tiny woman, that she had stopped referring to them as ‘the babies’.
‘Everyone’s fine, Luciana. And we’re all waiting for this year’s honey.’ Luciana’s son had a dairy farm up near Bolzano, and every year, for Christmas, she gave the family four one-kilo bottles of the different kinds of honey he produced.
‘Is it all gone?’ she asked, voice quick with worry. ‘Would you like some more?’
He pictured her, if he said yes, catching the first train to Bolzano the next morning. ‘No, Luciana, we still have the acacia. We haven’t opened it yet. And there’s still half of the castagno, so we should make it until Christmas. So long as we keep it hidden from Chiara.’
She smiled, long familiar with Chiara’s wolfish appetite. Unpersuaded by his answer, she said, ‘If you run out, let me know, and Giovanni can send some down. It’s no trouble.’
With another pat on his arm, she said, ‘Il Signor Conte is in his office.’ Brunetti nodded, and Luciana turned back toward the steps that led up to the first floor and the kitchen, where she reigned supreme; no one could recall a time when she had not done so.
The door to the Count’s office was open when Brunetti arrived, so he entered with only a perfunctory tap on the jamb. The Count looked up and greeted him with a smile so warm Brunetti began to wonder if there was some information the Count wanted in exchange for whatever he could supply.
Brunetti had no idea how old the Count was, nor was it easy to gauge it from the man’s appearance. Though his close-cropped hair was white, in combination with his sun-darkened skin, it gave an impression of vibrant, active contrast and removed any suggestion that the colour of his hair was an indication of age. Brunetti had once asked Paola how old her father was, and she had answered only that he’d have to find that out by having a look at the Count’s passport; she’d gone on gleefully to explain that he had four of them, from four different countries, all with different dates and places of birth.
The piercing blue eyes and the beaked nose would, Brunetti was certain, appear on all of them; Paola had never said whether the names on the passports were all the same, and he had never had the courage to ask.
The Count crossed the room to meet his son-in-law with a firm handshake and a smile. ‘How nice of you to come. Have a seat and something to drink. Coffee? Un’ombra?’
‘No, thank you,’ Brunetti said, taking a seat. ‘I know you’ve got an appointment, so I’ll just ask you what I’ve come for and try to be quick about it.’
Without looking at his watch, the Count said, ‘I’ve got half an hour, so there’s plenty of time for a drink.’
‘No, really,’ Brunetti insisted. ‘Maybe after we’ve talked, if there’s time.’
The Count went back around his desk and sat. ‘Who is it?’ he asked, showing his familiarity with Brunetti.
‘An Italian named Luca Guzzardi who was convicted after the war, though I don’t know for what crimes, and who, instead of going to prison, was sent to San Servolo, where he died.’ Brunetti chose to say nothing about Claudia Leonardo nor to explain the reason for his questions. In any case, the Count usually didn’t care why Brunetti wanted to know something; the fact that Brunetti was married to his daughter was sufficient reason to offer him any help he could.
The Count’s face remained impassive as Brunetti spoke. When he stopped, the Count pursed his lips and tilted his head to one side, as if listening to a sound from one of the palazzi on the other side of the Grand Canal. When he looked back at Brunetti, he said, ‘Ah, life really is long.’
Brunetti knew that, like his daughter, the Count would not resist the temptation to elucidate. After a moment, he did so. ‘Luca Guzzardi was the son of a business associate of my father. He called himself an artist.’ Seeing Brunetti’s confusion, he explained, ‘The son, not the father.’
Presumably, the Count was arranging the facts in an orderly way so as to tell the story clearly. He went on. ‘He was not an artist, though he did have a minor talent as an illustrator. This served him in very good stead, for he became a muralist and poster designer for the party in power before and during the war.’ There were times when Brunetti had no choice but to admire the Count’s arrogance: just as a man in his position did not call his servants by their first names, so too did he refuse to pronounce the name of the political party that had reduced his country to ruins.
Brunetti, who was familiar withI Fascisti, now remembered where he had heard the name Guzzardi, or at least read it: in a book on Fascist art, page after numbing page of well-fed factory workers and bright-eyed maidens with long braids, dedicated, in the most glaring of colours, to the triumph of people just like themselves.
‘He was quite active during the war, Luca Guzzardi,’ the Count went on, ‘both in Ferrara, where his family was originally from - I believe they dealt in textiles - and here, where both he and his father held positions of some importance.’
Brunetti had long since abandoned any idea of asking his father-in-law to explain how he came by the information he provided, but this time the Count supplied it. ‘As Paola may have told you, we had to leave the country in 1939, so none of us was here during the first years of the war. I was still a boy, but my father had many friends who remained, and after the war, when the family came back to Venice, he learned, and so did I, what had gone on while we were away from the city. Little of it was pleasant.’
After this brief explanation, he went on, ‘Guzzardi padre supplied cloth to the Army, for uniforms and, I think, tents. Thus he made a fortune. The son, because of his artistic talents, had some sort of job in propaganda, designing posters and billboards that showed the appropriate pictures of life in our great nation. He was also one of the people appointed to decide which pieces of decadent art should be disposed of by galleries and museums.’
‘Disposed of?’ Brunetti asked.
‘It was one of the diseases that came down from the North,’ the Count said drily, and then continued.
‘There was a long list of painters who were declared objectionable: Goya, Matisse, Chagall, and the German Expressionists. Many others, as well: it was enough that they were Jewish. Or that the subjects of their paintings weren’t pretty or supportive of Party myth. Any evidence had to be removed from the walls of museums, and many people took the precaution of removing paintings from the walls of their houses.’
‘Where did they go?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Well you may ask,’ the Count answered. ‘Often, they were the first paintings that were sold by people who needed enough money to survive or who wanted to leave the country, though they got very little for them.’
‘And the museums?’
The Count smiled, that peculiarly cynical tightening of the lips his daughter had inherited from him. ‘It was Guzzardi figlio whose job it was to decide which things had to be removed.’
‘And was it his job,’ Brunetti asked, beginning to see where this might be leading, ‘to decide where they were sent and to keep the records of where they were?’
‘I’m so glad to see
that all of these years at the police have done nothing to affect the workings of your mind, Guido,’ the Count said with affectionate irony.
Brunetti ignored the remark, and the Count continued, ‘Many things seem to have disappeared in the chaos. It seems though, that he went too far. I think it was in 1942. There was a Swiss family living on the Grand Canal in an old place that had been in their family for generations. The father, who had some sort of title,’ the Count said with an easy dismissal of all claims to aristocracy that did not go back more than a thousand years, ‘was the honorary consul, and the son was always in trouble for saying things against the current government here, but he was never arrested because of his father, who was very well connected. Finally, I can’t remember when it was, the son was found in the attic with two British Air Force officers he’d hidden there. The story was very unclear, but it seems that the Guzzardis had found out about it and one of them sent in the police.’ He stopped talking, and Brunetti watched him try to call back these memories from more than half a century ago.
‘The police took all of them away,’ the Count went on. ‘Later, the evening of the same day, both of the Guzzardis paid a call on the father in his palazzo and, well, there was a discussion of some sort. At the end of it, it was agreed that the boy would be sent home and the matter dropped.’
‘And the airmen?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘The Guzzardis, then?’ Brunetti asked.
‘They are reported to have left the palazzo that night with a large parcel.’
‘Decadent art?’
‘No one knows. The consul was a great collector of early master drawings: Tiziano, Tintoretto, Carpaccio. He was also a great friend of Venice and gave many things to the museums.’
‘But not the drawings?’
‘They were not in the palazzo at the end of the war,’ the Count explained.
‘And the Guzzardis?’ Brunetti asked.
‘It seems that the Consul had been at school with the man who was sent here as British ambassador right after the war, and the Englishman insisted that something be done about the Guzzardis.’
‘And?’
‘Guzzardi, the son, was put on trial. I don’t remember what the exact charges were, but there was never any question about what would happen. The ambassador was a very wealthy man, you see, as well as a very generous one, and that made him very powerful.’ The Count looked at the wall behind Brunetti, where three Tiziano drawings hung in a row, as if to ask them to prompt his memory.
‘I don’t know that the drawings were ever seen again. The rumour I heard at the time was that Guzzardi’s lawyer had made a deal and he would be acquitted if the drawings were given back, but then he had some sort of collapse or seizure during the trial, real or fake I don’t know, and the judges ended up convicting him - now that I think about it, it might have been for extortion - and sending him to San Servolo. There was talk that it was all a charade, put on so that the judges could send him there. Then they’d keep him there for a few months, then let him out, miraculously cured. That way, the ambassador would get what he wanted, but Guzzardi wouldn’t really be punished.’
‘But he died?’
‘Yes, he died.’
‘Anything suspicious about that?’
‘No, not that I can remember ever hearing. But San Servolo was a death pit.’ The Count considered this for a moment, then added, ‘Not that it’s much better with the way things are organized now.’
The window of Brunetti’s office looked across to the old men’s home at San Lorenzo, and what he saw there was enough to confirm everything he believed about the fate of the old, the mad, or the abandoned who came to be cared for by the current public institutions. He drew himself away from these reflections and glanced at his watch; it was past time for the Count to leave, if he was to be in time for lunch. He got to his feet. ‘Thank you. If you remember anything else . . .’
The Count interrupted and finished the thought for him, ‘I’ll let you know.’ He smiled, not a happy smile, and said, ‘It’s very strange to think about those times again.’
‘Why?’
‘Just like the French, we couldn’t forget what happened during the war years fast enough. You know my feelings about the Germans,’ he began, and Brunetti nodded to acknowledge the unyielding distaste with which the Count viewed that nation. ‘But to give them credit, they looked at what they did.’
‘Did they have a choice?’ Brunetti asked.
‘With Communists in charge of half the country, the Cold War begun, and the Americans terrified which way they’d go, of course they had a choice. The Allies, once the Nuremberg Trials were over, would never have pushed the Germans’ noses in it. But they chose to examine the war years, at least to a certain degree. We never did, and so there is no history of those years, at least none that’s reliable.’
Brunetti was struck by how much the Count sounded like Claudia Leonardo, though they were separated by more than two generations.
At the door of the office, Brunetti turned and asked, ‘And the drawings?’
‘What about them?’
‘What would they be worth now?’
‘That’s impossible to answer. No one knows what they were or how many of them there were, and there’s no proof that it happened.’
‘That the Guzzardis took them?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you think?’
‘Of course they took them,’ the Count said. ‘That’s the sort of people they were. Scum. Pretentious, upstart scum, the usual sort of people who are attracted to that kind of political idea. It’s the only chance they’ll ever have in their lives to have power or wealth, and so they gang together like rats and take what they can. Then, as soon as the game’s up, they’re the first to say they were morally opposed all the time but-feared for the safety of their families. It’s remarkable the way men like that always manage to find some high-sounding excuse for what they did. Then, at the first opportunity, they join the winning side.’ The Count threw up one hand in a gesture of angry contempt.
Brunetti could not remember ever seeing the Count pass so quickly from distant, amused contempt into raw anger. He wondered what particular set of experiences had led the Count to feel so strongly about these far-off events. This was hardly the time, however, to give in to his curiosity, so he contented himself with repeating his thanks and shaking the Count’s hand before leaving Palazzo Falier to return to his more modest home and to his lunch.
* * * *
7
In the apartment, he found the children in the middle of an argument. They stood at the door to the living room, voices raised, and barely glanced in Brunetti’s direction when he came in. Years of evaluating the tones of their various interchanges told him that their hearts weren’t in this one and they were doing little more than going through the motions of combat, rather in the fashion of walruses content to rise to the surface of the water and display their tusks to an opponent. As soon as one backed off, the other would flop down and swim away. The dispute concerned a CD, its ownership as disputed as it was currently divided: Raffi had the disc in his hand, and Chiara held the plastic box.
‘I bought it a month ago at Tempio della Musica,’ Chiara insisted.
‘Sara gave it to me for my birthday, stupid,’ retorted Raffi.
Applauding himself for his self-restraint, Brunetti did not suggest that they emulate a previous judgment, cut the squealing thing in two, and have done with it. Instead, he inquired, ‘Is your mother in her study?’
Chiara nodded but turned immediately back to combat. ‘I want to listen to it now,’ Brunetti heard her say as he went down the corridor.
The door to Paola’s study was open, so he went in, saying, ‘Can I claim refugee status?’
‘Hummm?’ she asked, looking up from the papers on her desk, peering at him through her reading glasses as though uncertain of the identity of the man who had just walked in unannounced.
‘Ca
n I claim refugee status?’
She removed her glasses. ‘Are they still at it?’ she asked. As formulaic as a Haydn symphony, the children’s bickering had moved into an adagio but Brunetti, in expectation of the allegro tempestoso that was sure to come, closed the door and sat on the sofa against the wall.
‘I spoke to your father.’
‘About what?’ she asked.
‘This thing with Claudia Leonardo.’
‘What “thing”?’ she asked, refusing to ask him how he came to know her name.
‘This grandfather and his criminal behaviour during the war.’
‘Criminal?’ Paola repeated, interested now.
Quickly, Brunetti explained what Claudia had told him and what he had learned from her father.