by Donna Leon
He thought she would ask him something, but she remained silent until the cigarette was reduced to a tiny stub and dropped into a blue ceramic bowl already half filled with butts.
‘Signora,’ he began, ‘the name of Dottor Filipetto has come up in our investigation.’ He paused, waiting to see if she would question him or refer to the notary’s name, but she did not. ‘And so I’ve come to you,’ he went on, ‘to see if you can tell me why Claudia might have wanted to talk to him.’
‘Claudia, is it, now?’ she asked.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Brunetti said, genuinely taken aback.
‘You speak of her as though she were a friend,’ she said angrily. ‘Claudia,’ she repeated, and his thoughts fled to her.
Which was more intimate, Brunetti wondered, to startle a person soon after sex or soon after death? Probably the latter, as they had been stripped of all pretence or opportunity to deceive. They lie there, exhausted and seeming painfully vulnerable, though they have been removed from all vulnerability and from all pain. To be helpless implies that help might be of some service: the dead were beyond that, beyond help and beyond hope.
‘I wish that had been possible,’ Brunetti said.
‘Why?’ she demanded, ‘so you could ask her questions and pick at her secrets?’
‘No, Signora, so that I could have talked to her about the books we both read.’
Signora Jacobs snorted in mingled disgust and disbelief.
Offended, though also intrigued by the idea that Claudia had secrets, Brunetti defended himself. ‘She was one of my wife’s students. We’d already talked about books.’
‘Books,’ she said, this time the disgust triumphant. Her anger caused her to catch her breath, and that in its turn provoked an explosion of coughing. It was a deep, humid smoker’s cough, and she went on for so long that Brunetti finally went into the kitchen and brought her a glass of water. He held it out until she took it and waited as she forced it down in tiny sips and finally stopped coughing.
‘Thank you,’ she said quite naturally and handed him the glass.
‘You’re welcome,’ he said, with equal ease, set the glass on the desk to her left and pulled his chair across so that he could sit facing her.
‘Signora,’ he began, ‘I don’t know what you think of the police, or what you think of me, but you must believe that all I want is to find the person who killed her. I don’t want to know anything that she might have wanted to remain secret, not unless it will help me do that. If such a thing is possible, I want her to rest in peace.’ He looked at her all the time he was speaking, willing her to believe him.
Signora Jacobs reached for another cigarette and lit it. Again she inhaled deeply and Brunetti felt himself grow tense, waiting for another explosion of coughing. But none came. When the butt was smouldering in the blue bowl she said, ‘Her family hasn’t the knack.’
Confused, he asked, ‘Of what?’
‘Resting in peace. Doing anything in peace.’
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know anyone in her family, only Claudia.’ He considered how to phrase the next question, then abandoned caution and asked simply, ‘Would you tell me about them?’
She pulled her hands to her face and made a steeple of them, touching her mouth with her forefingers. It was an attitude usually associated with prayer, though Brunetti suspected it had been a long time since this woman had prayed for, or to, anything.
‘You know who her grandfather was,’ she said. Brunetti nodded. ‘And her father?’ This time he shook his head.
‘He was born during the war, so of course his father named him Benito.’ She looked at him and smiled, as though she had just told a joke, but Brunetti did not return her smile. He waited for her to continue.
‘He was that kind of man, Luca.’
To Brunetti, Luca Guzzardi was a political opportunist who had died in a madhouse, so he thought it best to remain silent.
‘He really believed in it all. The marching and the uniforms and the return to the glory of the Roman Empire.’ She shook her head at this but did not smile. ‘At least he believed it at the beginning.’
Brunetti had never known, nor had either of his parents ever told him, if his father believed in all this. He didn’t know if it made a difference or, if it did, what kind. He bided his time silently, knowing that the old will always return to their subject.
‘He was a beautiful man.’ Signora Jacobs turned towards the sideboard that stood against the wall, gesturing with one hand to a ragged row of bleached photographs. Sensing that it was expected of him, Brunetti got to his feet and went over to examine the pictures. The first was a half-portrait of a young man, his head all but obscured by the plume-crested helmet of the Bersaglieri, an element of uniform the adult Brunetti had always found especially ludicrous. In another, the same young man held a rifle, in the one next to it, a sword, his body half draped in a long dark cloak. In each photo the pose was self-consciously belligerent, the chin thrust out, the gaze unyielding in response to the need to immortalize this moment of high patriotism. Brunetti found the poses as silly as the plumes and ribbons and epaulettes with which the young man’s uniform was bedecked. So resistant was Brunetti to the lure of the military that he could rarely resist the temptation to superimpose upon men in uniform the template of New Guinean tribesmen with bones stuck through their noses, their naked bodies painted white, their penises safeguarded by metre-long bamboo sheaths. Official ceremonies and parades thus caused him a certain amount of difficulty.
He continued to look at the photographs until he judged the necessary period of time had passed, and then he returned to his seat opposite Signora Jacobs. ‘Tell me more about him, Signora.’
Her glance was direct, its keenness touched by the faint clouding of age. ‘What’s to tell? We were young, I was in love, and the future was ours.’
Brunetti permitted himself to respond to the intimacy of her remark. ‘Only you were in love?’
Her smile was that of an old person, one who had left almost everything behind. ‘I told you: he was beautiful. Men like that, in the end, love only themselves.’ Before he could comment, she added, ‘I didn’t know that then. Or didn’t want to.’ She reached for another cigarette and lit it. Blowing out a long trail of smoke, she said, ‘It comes to the same thing, though, doesn’t it?’ She turned the burning tip of the cigarette towards herself, looked at it for a moment, then said, ‘The strange thing is that, even knowing this about him, it doesn’t change the way I loved him. And still do.’ She glanced up at him, then down at her lap. Softly, she said, ‘That’s why I want to give him back his good name.’
Brunetti remained silent, not wanting to interrupt her. Sensing this, she went on, ‘It was all so exciting, the sense or the hope that everything would be made new. Austria had been full of it for years, and so it never occurred to me to question it. And when I saw it again here, in men like Luca and his friends, I couldn’t see what it really was or what they were really like or that all it would bring us, all of us, was death and suffering.’ She sighed and then added, ‘Neither could Luca.’
When it began to seem as if she would not speak again, Brunetti asked, ‘How long did you know him?’
She considered this, then answered, ‘Six years, all through the last years of the war and his trial and then . . .’ her voice trailed off, leaving Brunetti curious as to how she would put it. ‘And then what came after,’ was all she said.
‘Did you see him on San Servolo?’
She cleared her throat, a tearing, wet sound that set Brunetti’s teeth on edge, so deeply did it speak of illness and dark liquids. ‘Yes. I went out once a week until they wouldn’t let me see him any more.’
‘Why was that?’
‘I think it was because they didn’t want anyone to know how they were kept.’
‘But why the change? If they’d let you go in the beginning, that is,’ Brunetti explained.
‘Because he got much worse after he was there. A
nd after he realized he wasn’t going to leave.’
‘Should he have?’ Brunetti asked, then clarified his question. ‘That is, when he first went in, did he or did you think he was going to be able to leave?’
‘That was the agreement,’ she said.
‘With whom?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Why are you asking all of this?’ she asked him.
‘Because I want to understand things. About him, and about the past.’
‘Why?’
He thought that should be obvious to her. ‘Because it might help.’
‘About Claudia?’ she asked. He wished there had been some trace of hope in her voice, but he knew she was too old to find hope in anything that followed death.
He decided to tell her the truth, rather than what he wanted to say. ‘Perhaps.’ Then he led her back to his original question. ‘What was the agreement?’
She lit another cigarette and smoked half of it before she decided to answer. ‘With the judges. That he would confess to everything and, when he had his collapse, they’d send him to San Servolo, where he could stay a year or two and when everyone had forgotten about him, he’d be released.’ She finished the cigarette and stuffed it among the others in the ashtray. ‘And come back to me,’ she added. After a long pause, she said, ‘That was all I wanted.’
‘But what happened?’
She studied Brunetti’s face, then answered, ‘You’re too young to know about San Servolo, about what really happened there.’
He nodded.
‘I was never told. I went there one Saturday morning. I went out every week, even when all they did was tell me I couldn’t see him and send me home. But that time they told me he had died.’ Her voice ground to a halt, and she looked down at her lap, where her hands lay, inert. She turned them over and looked down at the smooth palms, rubbing at the left with the tips of the first three fingers of the right in what seemed to Brunetti an attempt to erase the lifeline. ‘That’s all they told me,’ she went on. ‘No explanation. But it could have been anything. One of the other patients could have killed him. That was always covered up, when it happened. Or it could have been one of the guards. Or it could have been typhus, for all I know. They were kept like animals, once people stopped coming to see them.’ She drew her hands into tight fists and pressed them on her thighs.
‘But what about the agreement with the judges?’ Brunetti asked.
She smiled and laughed, almost as if she really found his question amusing. ‘You, of all people, Commissario, should know better than to believe anything a judge promises you.’ When Brunetti didn’t argue the point, she continued. ‘Two of the judges were Communists, so they wanted someone to be punished, and the third was the son of the Fascist Party chief in Mestre, so he had to prove that he was the purest of the pure and not at all influenced by his father’s politics.’
‘What about the Amnesty?’ Brunetti asked, thinking of the general slate-cleaning Togliatti had orchestrated just after the end of the war, pardoning all crimes committed by either side during the Fascist era. He didn’t understand how Guzzardi could have been convicted when thousands went free for having done the same things, or far worse.
‘The judges declared that the crime took place on Swiss territory,’ she said simply. ‘No amnesty would cover that.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Brunetti protested.
‘The home of the Swiss Consul. They said it was Swiss territory.’
‘But that’s absurd,’ Brunetti said.
‘That’s not what the judges said,’ she insisted. ‘And the appeal court confirmed it. Legally, I did everything I could.’ Her voice was truculent and had taken on that hard edge voices acquire when they are used to defend a belief rather than a fact.
Brunetti had heard enough stories from his father’s friends about what went on just after the end of the war to believe that Guzzardi had been convicted because of this invented technicality. Many grudges and injuries had been racked up during the war, and many of them were paid back after the German surrender. The judges could easily have persuaded Guzzardi, or his lawyer, to accept their offer, only to renege on it once the convicted man had been taken to San Servolo.
He glanced at the old woman and saw that she sat with one fist pressed against her lips. ‘When Claudia came to me,’ he said, ‘she wanted to know if it were possible to reverse a judgment for someone who was convicted just after the war, and when I asked her about it, she said only that it was for her grandfather, but she didn’t give me much information.’ He paused to see if she would respond; when she did not, he went on. ‘Now after what you’ve said, I have a clearer understanding. It’s been a long time since I studied law, Signora, but I don’t think the case is very complicated. I think it’s likely that a formal request to reverse this decision would be granted, but I don’t think that would lead to an official proclamation of innocence.’
She watched him as he said these last sentences, and he watched her making other calculations or recalling other words. A very long time passed before she spoke. ‘Are you sure of this? That there would be no official declaration, some sort of ceremony that would restore his honour and his good name?’
From what Brunetti had heard of Guzzardi, it seemed unlikely that he had ever had much honour worth saving, but Signora Jacobs was too old and too frail to be told that. ‘Signora, to the best of my knowledge, there is no legal mechanism or process for that. Whoever might have told you that the possibility of such a thing exists is either misinformed or is intentionally telling you something that isn’t true.’ Brunetti stopped here, not willing to consider, or mention, how long the reversal of a judgment made a half a century ago would be likely to take, as it would not be achieved in this woman’s lifetime. If the redemption of her grandfather’s good name had been something Claudia wanted to offer to her grandmother, then her trip to Brunetti’s office had been a fool’s errand, but the old woman hardly needed to hear this.
She turned her head and looked over at the line of photos, and for a long time she ignored Brunetti and stared at them. She pressed her thin lips together and closed her eyes, letting her head fall forward wearily. As they sat, Brunetti decided to ask her about the events that had precipitated Guzzardi’s Luciferian fall from high estate to the dark horror of San Servolo. As she raised a hand from her lap, Brunetti asked, ‘What happened to the drawings?’
She had been reaching for another cigarette when he spoke, and he saw her hand hesitate in mid-air. She gave him a surprised glance, then looked back at her hand, followed through on the gesture, and took a cigarette. ‘What drawings?’ she asked; her look had prepared Brunetti for her protestation of ignorance.
‘Someone told me that the Swiss Consul had given some drawings to the Guzzardis.’
‘Sold some, you mean,’ she said with a heavy emphasis on the first word.
‘As you like,’ Brunetti conceded and left it at that.
‘That was something else that happened after the war,’ she said, sounding tired. ‘People who had sold things tried to get them back by saying they’d been forced to sell them. Whole collections had to be given back by people who had bought them in good faith.’ She managed to sound indignant.
Brunetti had no doubt that things like this had happened, but he had read enough to know that most of the injustice had been suffered by those who, from timidity or outright menace, had been led to sell or sign away their possession. He saw no point, however, in disputing this with Signora Jacobs.
‘Certo, certo,’ Brunetti mumbled.
Suddenly he felt his wrist imprisoned by her thin fingers. ‘It’s the truth,’ she whispered, her voice tight and passionate. ‘When he was on trial they all got in touch with the judges, saying he had cheated them out of this or that, demanding their things back.’ She yanked savagely on his hand, pulling him closer until his face was a hand’s breath from hers. ‘It was all lies. Then and now. All of the things are his, legally his. No one can trick me.’ Brunetti breathed
in the raw stench of tobacco and bad teeth, saw something fierce flare up in her eyes. ‘Luca could never have done something like that. He could never have done anything dishonourable.’ Her voice had the measured cadence of one who had said the same thing many times, as if repetition would force it to be true.
There was nothing to be said here, so he waited, though he moved slowly back from her, waiting to hear what her next defence would be.
It seemed, however, that Signora Jacobs had said all she was going to, for she reached over for another cigarette, lit it, and puffed at it as though it were the only thing of interest in the room. At last, when the cigarette was finished and she had dropped it on top of the pile of butts, she said, without bothering to turn to him, ‘You can go now.’
* * * *