Wilful Behaviour - [Commissario Brunetti 11]

by Donna Leon

  Brunetti decided he was tired of games. ‘Because she was a young woman, Signora, and because your husband has a history of finding young women attractive.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded too quickly, glancing quickly at her husband.

  ‘It seems simple enough to me, Signora. I’m talking about what everyone seems to know: your husband’s tendency to betray you with younger women, more attractive women.’

  Her face contorted, but not in pain or in any of the emotions he might have expected as a result of the remarks he had made sound as offhand and insulting as he could. If she looked anything, she looked startled, even shocked.

  ‘What do you mean, that people know? How can they know about it?’

  Keeping his voice entirely conversational, he said, ‘In the reading room, when I was waiting, even the old men talked about it, about the way he was always grabbing at tits.’ He looked pointedly at her chest and slipped from the precisely articulated Italian he had been speaking into the most heavily accented and vulgar Veneziano, ‘I can see why he told me he likes to get his hands on a real pair of tits.’

  She gasped so loud that Ford, who had understood nothing of what Brunetti had said in dialect, turned from the window. He saw his wife, hands clutched to her breast, staring open-mouthed at a calm and self-possessed Brunetti, who was leaning forward and saying politely, in precise Italian, ‘Excuse me, Signora. Is something wrong?’

  She stood, mouth still open, drawing immense gulps of air into her lungs. ‘He said that? He said that to you?’ she gasped.

  Ford moved quickly away from the window. He had no idea what was happening as he came towards his wife, his arms raised as if to embrace her protectively.

  ‘Get away from me,’ she said, voice tight, struggling to speak. ‘You said that to him?’ she hissed. ‘You said that after what I did for you? First you betray me with that little whore and then you say that about me?’ Her voice rose with every question, her face growing darker and more congested.

  ‘Eleonora, be quiet,’ Ford said as he drew even nearer. She raised a hand to push him away, and he put out one of his own to grab her arm. But she moved suddenly to the side, and his open hand came down, not on her wrist or her arm but on her breast.

  She froze, and instinct or longing drove her forward, leaning into his hand, but then she pulled sharply back and raised a clenched fist. ‘Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me there, the way you touched that little whore.’ Her voice went up an octave. ‘You won’t touch her again, will you? Not with a knife in her chest where your hand was, will you?’ Ford stood, frozen with horror. ‘Will you?’ she screamed, ‘Will you?’ Suddenly she pulled her fist back and brought it crashing down once, twice, three times, into his chest as the two men stood there paralysed in the face of her rage. After the third blow, she moved away from him. As suddenly as it had started, her rage evaporated and she started to cry, great tearing sobs. ‘I did all of that for you, and you can still say that to him.’

  ‘Shut up!’ Ford shouted at her. ‘Shut up, you fool.’

  Tears streaming from her eyes, she looked up at him and asked, voice choking with sobs, ‘Why do you always have to have pretty things? Both of you, Daddy and you, all you’ve ever wanted is pretty things. Neither of you ever wanted...’ Sobbing overcame her and choked off her last word, but Brunetti had no doubt that it was going to be ‘me’.

  * * * *

  26

  Though Ford tried to stop Brunetti with loud bluster, insisting that he had no right to arrest his wife, the woman offered no resistance and said that she would go along with him. Ford in their wake, hurling threats and the names of important people at their backs, Brunetti led her to the front door. Behind it they found Vianello, lounging up against the wall, his jacket unbuttoned and, to Brunetti’s experienced eye, his pistol evident in its holster.

  Brunetti was in some uncertainty as to what to say to Vianello, as he wasn’t at all sure that what he had just heard Signora Ford say could be construed as a confession of murder. There had been no witness, save for Ford, and he could be counted upon to deny hearing what she had said or insist she’d said something else entirely. It depended, then, on his getting her to repeat her confession in Vianello’s hearing or, even better, on getting her to the Questura, where she could record it or speak it while being videotaped. He knew that a future case based on his word alone would be laughed at by any prosecuting magistrate with experience in the courtroom; indeed, it would be laughed at by anyone with experience of the law.

  ‘I’ve called for a boat, sir,’ Vianello said quite calmly when he saw them. ‘It should be here soon.’

  Brunetti nodded, as though this were the most normal thing in the word for Vianello to have done.

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  ‘At the end of the calle,’ Vianello said.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ Ford again insisted, putting himself at the top of the steps and blocking Brunetti’s path. ‘My father-in-law knows the Praetore. You’ll be fired for this.’

  Brunetti didn’t have to say a word. Vianello went over to Ford, said, ‘Permesso,’ and moved him bodily to one side, freeing the stairway for his wife and Brunetti to start down. Brunetti didn’t look behind him, but he could hear the Englishman arguing, then shouting, then making grunting noises that must have resulted from a futile attempt to shift Vianello from the top of the steps so that he could follow his wife.

  The sun gleamed down, even though it was November and meant to be much colder. As they emerged from the building, Brunetti heard the motor of a boat from their right, and he led the silent woman down towards it. A police launch swept up to the steps at the end of thecalle and stopped; at their approach, a uniformed officer set a wide piece of planking between the gunwales and the embankment, then helped the woman and Brunetti on board.

  Brunetti led her down to the cabin, uncertain whether to speak to her or wait for her to begin to speak on her own. His curiosity made silence more difficult, but he opted for that and, sitting across from one another, they rode silently back to the Questura.

  Inside, he took her to one of the small rooms used for questioning and advised her that everything they said would be recorded. He led her to a chair on one side of the table, sat opposite her, gave their names and the date and asked if she would like to have a lawyer with her as she talked. She waved a hand at him in dismissal, but he repeated the question until she said, ‘No. No lawyer.’

  She sat silent, looking down at the surface of the table in which people had, over the course of the years, carved initials and words and pictures. Her face was splotched with red, her eyes still swollen from crying. She traced some initials with the forefinger of her right hand then finally looked up at Brunetti.

  ‘Is it true that Claudia Leonardo worked at the library where you are one of the directors?’ He thought it best to avoid any reference to her husband until the interview had taken on its own momentum.

  She nodded.

  ‘I’m sorry, Signora,’ he said with a softening of his face that was not quite a smile, ‘but you must say something. Because of the recording.’

  She looked around, searching for the microphones, but as they were set into two wall sockets that looked like light switches, she failed to identify them.

  ‘Did Claudia Leonardo work at the Biblioteca della Patria?’ he asked again.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long after she began to work there did you meet her?’

  ‘Not very long.’

  ‘Could you tell me how you first met her? The circumstances, I mean.’

  She folded the fingers of her right hand into the palm and, using the nail of her thumb, began to dig idly at one of the letters on the table, freeing it of the greasy material that had accumulated over the years. As Brunetti watched, her nail pried free a tiny sliver of what looked like black wax. She brushed it to the floor. She looked at him. ‘I had to go down to the library to look for a book, and when I came in she asked
me how she could help me. She didn’t know who I was.’

  ‘What was your first impression of her, Signora?’

  She shrugged the question away, but before Brunetti could remind her of the microphones, she said, ‘I didn’t have much of an impres ...’ Then, perhaps recalling where they were and why she was here, she sat up straighter in her chair, looked over at Brunetti and said, voice a bit firmer, ‘She seemed like a nice girl.’ She emphasized ‘seemed’. ‘She was very polite, and when I told her who I was she was very respectful.’

  ‘Do you think that was an accurate assessment of the girl’s character?’ Brunetti asked.

  She paused not an instant over this question and said, ‘It can’t be, not after what she did to my husband.’

  ‘But what did you think at the beginning, when you first met her?’ he asked.

  It was evident to Brunetti that she had to overcome her reluctance to answer this question, but when she did she said, ‘I was wrong. I saw the truth, but it took time.’

  Abandoning the attempt to get her to describe her first impression of the girl, Brunetti asked, ‘What did you come to believe?’

  ‘I saw that she was, that she was, that she was ...’ Stuck on that phrase, her voice died away. She looked down at the initial on the table, dug a bit more material out of it, and finally said, ‘That she was interested in my husband.’

  ‘Interested in an improper way?’ Brunetti suggested.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was this something that had happened before, that women became interested in your husband?’ He thought it might be better to phrase it this way, placing the guilt on the women, at least for the moment, until she was more adjusted to accepting the so-obvious truth.

  She nodded, then quickly said, voice too loud and nervous, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did this happen often?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Had it happened before with the employees of the Biblioteca?’

  ‘Yes. The last one.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I found out. About them. He told me what happened, that she was ... well, that she was immoral. I sent her away, back to Geneva, where she came from.’

  ‘And did you find out about Claudia, as well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could you tell me how that happened?’

  ‘I heard him talking on the phone to her.’

  ‘Did you hear what he was saying?’ When she nodded, he asked, ‘Did you listen to the conversation or only to his part of it?’

  ‘Only his part. He was in his office, but the door wasn’t closed. So I could hear him talking.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That if she wanted to continue to work in the Biblioteca, nothing else would happen.’ He watched her going back in time and listening to her husband’s part of that conversation. ‘He told her that if she would just forget about it and not tell anyone, he promised not to do anything else.’

  ‘And you took that to mean that it was Claudia Leonardo who was bothering your husband?’ Brunetti asked, not voicing his scepticism but curious that she could have interpreted his words this way.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you still think that now?’

  Her voice suddenly grew fierce, the linked initials on the table below her forgotten. ‘It had to be that way,’ she said with tight conviction. ‘She was his lover.’

  ‘Who told you that she was his lover?’ As he waited for her answer he studied this woman, the restrained frenzy in her hands, recalling the way she had hungrily leaned her breast into the accidental touch of her husband’s hand, and an entirely new possibility came to him. ‘Did your husband confess that they were lovers, Signora?’ he asked in a softer voice.

  First came the tears, which surprised him by coming without any emotion registering on her face. ‘Yes,’ she said, turning her attention back to the table.

  Hunting dogs, Brunetti knew, were divided into two general classes: sight hounds and scent hounds. Like one of the second, he was off, racing through the thick, wet grass of an autumn day, leaping over obstacles that had been placed in his path, catching traces of his prey that had previously been obscured by heavier scents. His mind circling, leaping, lurching after its prey, he found himself back again at the starting point, and he asked, ‘Whose idea was it to talk to the old woman, Signora, and offer her the chance to clear Guzzardi’s name? Was it your husband’s?’

  She should have been surprised. She should have looked up at him, startled, and asked him what he was talking about. Had she done that, he would not have believed her, but he would have realized how far he still had to go before he hunted her to ground.

  Instead, she surprised him by asking, ‘How did you know about that?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. But I know. Which of them had the idea?’

  ‘Maxwell,’ she said. ‘One of the people who wrote a letter of recommendation for Claudia was Signora Jacobs. She’d been a patron of the Biblioteca for some time, always asking about Guzzardi and whether we had ever received any papers that would prove he didn’t take those drawings.’ She paused and Brunetti resisted the urge to prompt her. ‘My father knew him and he said there never would be any proof because he did take them. They’d be worth a fortune now, my father said, but no one knew where they were.’

  ‘No one knew that Signora Jacobs had them?’

  ‘No, of course not. No one ever went to her house, and everyone knew how poor she was.’ She paused, then corrected this, ‘Or thought she was.’

  ‘How did he find out?’ he asked, still careful not to refer directly to her husband.

  ‘Claudia. One day, talking about Signora Jacobs, she said something about the things that were in her house and what a pity it was that no one got to see them except her and the old woman. I think she was the only one who went there.’ And the cleaning woman, Brunetti wanted to tell her. And the Somali cleaning woman so honest she was trusted with the keys while the rest of the city was kept away, untrusted and ignorant.

  ‘How do you know about this, Signora?’

  ‘I heard them talking, my father and Maxwell. They were both so used to ignoring me,’ she began, and Brunetti marvelled that she could seem so casually accepting of this, ‘that they talked about everything in front of me.’

  ‘Was the idea of clearing Guzzardi’s name a way to get the drawings from her?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘I think so. Maxwell told Claudia that someone had come to the Biblioteca with papers that showed that Guzzardi was innocent.’ He watched as she tried to recall what had been said in front of her.

  ‘Did he suggest that Signora Jacobs give the drawings in exchange?’

  ‘No, all he did was tell Claudia that there was proof that he was innocent and suggest she ask Signora Jacobs what she wanted to do.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I don’t know what happened. I think Claudia talked to her about it, and I think my father had someone go and talk to the old woman.’ She sounded vague and uninterested in this, but then she glanced at him sharply and said, ‘Then I heard him talking to Claudia on the phone.’

  ‘And is that when he told you that they were lovers?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Yes. But he told me that it was over, that he’d ended it. In fact, he slammed the phone down on her that time, told her to be very careful what she told people about him. And he sounded so upset that I made a noise.’ She stopped again.

  Brunetti waited.

  ‘He came out of his office and saw me, and he asked me what I’d heard. I told him, I told him that I couldn’t stand it any more, him and those girls, that I was afraid of what I’d do if he didn’t stop.’ She nodded her head, no doubt hearing the words again, replaying the jealous scene between her and her husband.

  After some time, she went on, ‘That’s when he told me about the way she had tempted him and how he hadn’t wanted to do anything. But she’d thrown herself at him. Touched him.’ She pronounced the words, ‘tempted’
and ‘thrown’ with disgust, but when she said ‘touched’ she spoke with shock that approached horror. ‘And he told me then that he was afraid of what would happen if she came back, that he was a man, and he was weak. That it was me he loved but he didn’t know what would happen if this wicked girl tempted him again.’

  Seeing how agitated she was becoming, Brunetti decided it would be best to lead her away from these memories for a moment. ‘Let me go back to one thing, Signora, to the conversation you heard when you came in. Your husband was telling her that, if she came back to the Biblioteca and didn’t tell anyone, he wouldn’t do anything else? Is that correct?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to remind you, Signora, but you have to speak.’