by Donna Leon
‘We can but hope,’ Brunetti observed, recalling childhood tales of the misbehaviour between priests and nuns.
‘Indeed. At any rate, it all stayed there until the war was over and the Faliers came home, when my father gave everything back. The Count gave him the money. He also gave him a small Carpaccio, the one that’s now in our bedroom.’
After considering all of this, Brunetti said, ‘I’ve never heard about this, not in all the time I’ve known him.’
‘Orazio doesn’t talk about what happened during the war.’
Surprised that Lele should speak so familiarly of a man Brunetti had never addressed, not in more than two decades, by his first name, he asked, ‘But how do you know about it? From your father?’
‘Yes, at least part of it. Orazio told me the rest.’
‘I didn’t know you knew him that well, Lele.’
‘We fought together with the Partisans for two years.’
‘But he said he was only a boy when they left Venice.’
‘That was in 1939. Three years later, he was a young man. A very dangerous young man. He was one of the best. Or worst, I suppose, if you were a German.’
‘Where were you?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Up near Asiago, in the mountains,’ Lele said, paused, and then added, ‘Anything else you want to know about this, I think you better ask your father-in-law.’
Taking that as the command it so clearly was, Brunetti went back to the subject at hand. ‘Tell me more about your father, before he was arrested.’
‘Before that, he’d taken only his ten per cent, and he’d done his best to try to get as much as he could for the things his clients had to sell. And, for whatever it’s worth, he never bought anything from them. No matter how good the price they offered him, and no matter how much he wanted to own the object, he refused to buy anything for himself.’
‘And Guzzardi?’ Brunetti asked, bringing the story back where he wanted it to be.
‘They were a perfect team. The father was the money man and the son was the artist.’ Lele’s voice dribbled acid on the word. ‘They got into the antiques business almost by accident. They must have smelled how much money they could make at it. People like that always do. At the beginning, they hired someone to work as an appraiser for them, and because both of them were senior Party members, they had no trouble in getting themselves into the cartel. And before you knew it, people here, and in Padova and Treviso, who wanted to sell things and needed to do it fast, well, they ended up dealing with the Guzzardis. And they sold. The Guzzardis sucked up everything. Like sharks.’
‘Did they have anything to do with your father’s arrest?’
Lele said, cautious as always, given his belief that all phone conversations were monitored by some agency of the state, ‘It’s always wise business procedure to eliminate the competition.’
‘Did they buy only for themselves or also for clients?’
‘When they started out - because neither of them had any taste at all - they bought for clients, people who might have heard that a certain collection was for sale and who didn’t want to get their hands dirty by being seen to buy things openly. This happened more and more, the closer it got to the end of the war. People wanted the art works, but they didn’t want it to be seen that they’d bought them.’
‘And the Guzzardis?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Toward the end, they are said to have bought only for themselves. By then Luca had developed a fairly good eye. Even my father admitted that. He wasn’t stupid, Luca, not at all.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘The father bought paintings; Luca was interested in drawings and etchings.’
‘Is that what Luca was good at?’
‘Not particularly, no, I don’t think so. But they’re very portable, and because there’s always more than one etching and because very often painters made a few sketches or drawings before a painting, it’s harder to trace them than if they were unique. And they’re very easy to hide.’
‘I had no idea any of this went on,’ Brunetti said when it seemed that Lele had finished speaking.
‘Few people do. And even fewer want to know anything about it. That’s what we did, right after Liberation: we all decided that we’d forget what had happened during the last decade, especially in the years since the beginning of the war. Besides, we finished on the winning side, so it was even easier to forget. That’s what we’ve had since then, the politics of amnesia. It’s what we wanted and it’s what we’ve got.’
Brunetti had seldom heard it better named. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.
‘I could fill a history book with what went on during those years. Then, as soon as the war ended, things went back to business as usual, just like in Germany. Well, no, it took a little longer there because they had to go through all that de-Nazification stuff, not that it served for much. But these pigs, these agents, had their snouts back in the trough almost as soon as the war was over.’
‘You make it sound like you know them.’
‘Of course I do. A few of them are still alive. One of them even has a portfolio of Old Master drawings in a bank vault, has had it there since he acquired it in 1944.’
‘Legally?’
Lele gave a snort of contempt. ‘If someone is in fear of his life and sells something, signs a bill of sale - and the Guzzardis were always careful to get them - then the sale’s still legal. But if someone were to steal those drawings from the bank vault and give them back to the original owner, I’m sure that would be illegal.’ Lele allowed a long pause to draw out from that remark before he said abruptly, ‘I’ll call you if I think of anything,’ and then his voice was gone.
* * * *
9
Brunetti had the entire afternoon to muse upon what Lele had told him. He’d read little of the history of the last war, but certainly other centuries provided sufficient examples of plundering and profiteering to illustrate all that Lele had said. The sack of Rome, the sack of Constantinople: hadn’t both of them been followed by vast transfers of wealth and art and by the collateral destruction of even more? Rome had been left in ruins, and Byzantium smouldered for weeks as the victors devoted themselves to looting. Indeed, the bronze horses that pranced above the entrance of the Basilica had been part of the loot the Venetians brought home. Certainly the defeat of those cities must have been preceded by hysteria on the part of those desperate to escape. In the end, no matter how beautiful or precious, what object had any value in comparison to life? Some years ago he had read an account by a French crusader who had been present at the siege and sack of Constantinople: he’d written that ‘so much booty had never been gained in any city since the creation of the world’. But what did that count in the face of the loss of so many lives?
Shortly after seven he pulled himself free from these reflections, moved some paper idly from one side of his desk to the other so as to give the appearance that he had done something that afternoon other than try to make sense of human history, and went home.
He found Paola, predictably, in her study, where he joined her, flopping down on the battered sofa she refused to part with. ‘You never told me about your father,’ he said by way of introduction.
‘Never told you what about my father?’ she asked. Judging by both his tone and his manner that this would be a long conversation, she abandoned the notes she was preparing.
‘About the war. And what he did.’
‘You make it sound as if you’d discovered he’s a war criminal,’ she observed.
‘Hardly,’ Brunetti conceded. ‘But someone told me today that he fought with the Partisans up near Asiago.’
She smiled. ‘So now you know as much as I know.’
‘Really?’
‘Absolutely. I know that he fought and that he was very young when he was there, but he has never chosen to talk to me about it, and I’ve never had the courage to ask my mother about it.’
‘Courage?’
‘From
her tone and the way she reacted whenever I brought the subject up, as I did when I was younger, I realized that it was not something she wanted to talk about and that I shouldn’t ask him, either. So I didn’t, and then I suppose I got out of the habit of being curious about it or wanting to know exactly what he did.’ Before Brunetti could respond to this, she added, ‘Just like you with your father. All you’ve ever told me is that he came back from Africa, went off on the Russian campaign and was gone for years, and when he came back everyone who knew him said he wasn’t the same person who had marched away. But you’ve never told me more than that. And your mother, when she talked about it, never said anything more than that he had been gone for five years.’
Brunetti’s childhood had been scarred by the results of those five years, for his father had been a man much given to fits of violence that came upon him for no apparent reason. A chance word, a gesture, a book lying on the kitchen table: any of these could set him off into a rage from which only Brunetti’s mother could free him. As if possessed of the power of the saints themselves, she could do this merely by placing a hand upon his arm: even the lightest touch sufficed to pull him back from whatever hell he had slipped into.
When not in the grip of these sudden, spectacular moods, he was a quiet man, much given to silence and solitude. Repeatedly wounded in the war, he had been granted a military pension, on which the family tried to live. Brunetti had never understood him and, in a certain sense, had never know him, for his wife always insisted that the real man was the one who marched off to war and not the one who came home. She, by the grace of God or love, or both, loved both of them.
Only once had Brunetti seen evidence of the man his father must have been, the day he came home to announce that he was the only student in his class to have been accepted into the Liceo Classico. When he told his parents, doing his best to hide his bursting pride and fearful how his father would take this news, the older man pushed himself up from the table, where he was helping his wife shell peas, and came to stand beside his son. Placing his hand on Brunetti’s cheek, he said, ‘You make me a man again, Guido. Thank you.’ The memory of his father’s smile was enough to call down the stars, and for the first time since his childhood Brunetti had felt himself melt with love for this gentle, decent man.
‘Are you listening to me, Guido?’ Paola asked, calling him back to her room and her presence.
‘Yes, yes. I was just thinking about something.’
‘So,’ she went on as though there had been no interruption, ‘I know as little about what my father did as you know about yours. They fought and they came back, and neither of them wanted to talk about what happened while they were away.’
‘Do you think it was so awful, what they had to do?’
‘Or what was done to them,’ Paola answered.
‘There was a difference, though,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Your father came back to fight voluntarily. Or he must have. Lele said the family got safely to England, so he must have chosen to come back.’
‘And your father?’
‘My mother always told me he never wanted to join the Army. But he had no choice. They rounded them up, and after they’d trained them to march together without falling over one another, they sent them off to campaign in Africa and Greece and Albania and Russia, sent them off with shoes made out of cardboard because some friend of some friend of someone in the government made a fortune on the contract.’
‘He really never talked about it?’ Paola asked.
‘Not to me, and not to Sergio, no,’ Brunetti said.
‘Do you think he might have talked to his friends?’
‘I don’t think he had any friends,’ Brunetti said, admitting to what he had always thought of as the great tragedy of his father’s life.
‘Most men don’t, do they?’ she asked, but there was only sadness in her tone.
‘What do you mean? Of course we have friends.’ In the face of her visible sympathy, Brunetti could not keep the indignation from his voice.
‘I think most men don’t, Guido, but you know that’s what I think because I’ve said it so many times. You have what the Americans call “pals”, men you can talk to about sports or politics or cars.’ She considered what she had said. ‘Well, since you live in Venice and work for the police, I guess you can substitute guns and boats for cars. Things, always things. But in the end it’s the same: you never talk about what you feel or fear, not the way women do.’
‘Are we talking about lack of friends or the fact that we don’t talk about the same things women do? I’m not sure they’re the same.’
This was an old battle, and Paola apparently was in no mood to fight it again that evening, not with Brunetti in so fragile a mood and not with a long class to prepare for the following morning. ‘There aren’t going to be too many evenings like this one left, do you think?’ she asked, holding the remark out as a flag of truce. ‘Shall we get a glass of wine and go out and sit on the terrace?’
‘The sun’s already set,’ he said, not willing to give in so easily and still stung by the implication that he had no friends.
‘We can watch the glow, then. And I’d like to sit beside you and hold your hand.’
‘Goose,’ he said, moved.
* * * *
Claudia did not appear in class the following day, a fact which Paola noted but to which she paid little attention. Students were by definition unreliable, though she had to admit that Claudia had seemed not to be. The reason for her absence was made clear to her in a phone call from Brunetti, which reached her at her office at the university later that same afternoon.
‘I have bad news for you,’ he began, filling her with instant terror for the safety of her family. Sensing that, Brunetti said, voice as calm as he could make it, ‘No, it’s not the children.’ He gave her a moment to register that and then went on, ‘It’s Claudia Leonardo. She’s dead.’
Paola had a flash of memory of Claudia’s turning back from the door of the classroom and saying that Lily Bart’s death had broken her heart. Please let someone’s heart be broken by Claudia’s death, she had time to think, before Brunetti went on: ‘There was a burglary in her apartment, and she was killed.’
‘When?’
‘Last night.’
‘How?’
‘She was stabbed.’
‘What happened?’
‘What I was told was that her flatmate came back this morning and found her. Claudia was on the floor: it looks as if she came in and found whoever it was and he panicked.’
‘With a knife in his hand?’ Paola asked.
‘I don’t know. I’m just telling you what it sounds like for now.’
‘Where are you?’
‘There. I just got here. I’ve got Vianello’s telefonino.’
‘Why did you call?’
‘Because you knew her and I didn’t want you to hear about it some other way.’
Paola let a long silence stretch out between them. ‘Was it quick?’
‘I hope so,’ was the only answer he could give.
‘Her family?’
‘I don’t know. I told you I just got here. We haven’t even looked at the place yet.’ There was a noise in the background, a voice, two voices, and then Brunetti said, ‘I’ve got to go. Don’t expect me before tonight.’ And then he was gone.
Gone perhaps from the sound of his wife’s voice but not from the presence of death, an apartment in Dorsoduro, not far from the Pensione Seguso but back two streets from the Canale della Giudecca.
He handed the telefonino back to Vianello, who put it in the pocket of his jacket. Not for the first time, Brunetti found himself surprised by the sight of Vianello in civilian clothes, the result of his too-long-delayed promotion to Ispettore. Though the wrapping had changed, the contents were the same: reliable, honest, clever Vianello had responded to Brunetti’s call, which had caught him at home, just about to spend his day off on a shopping expedition t
o the mainland with his wife. Brunetti was grateful for Vianello’s instinctive willingness to join him: the solid, confident bulk of the man would help him with what was to come.
Vianello had overheard Brunetti’s conversation and made no attempt to pretend that he had not. ‘Your wife knew her, sir?’
‘She was one of her students,’ Brunetti explained.
If Vianello thought it strange that Brunetti knew this, he kept it to himself and suggested, ‘Shall we go up, sir?’
A uniformed officer stood at the door to the street, another at the top of the second flight of steps, directly before the open door of the apartment. The rest of the building, in which there were three other apartments, might as well have been empty, so profound was the silence that radiated from all the closed doors. Yet Claudia’s flatmate was in one of those apartments, he knew, for their landlady had said so when she phoned.