by Donna Leon
‘Wine?’
‘Yes. And beef. And that’s all.’ Lolo took another sip, swirled the glass around, and then said, ‘I will never again in my life criticize the bureaucracy in this fair land.’
‘Here?’ Brunetti asked, unable to disguise his astonishment.
The waiter drifted over to their table, set a bowl of salted peanuts between them and then left.
‘Guido,’ Lolo said, digging up a handful of peanuts and leaning his head back to drop them into his mouth one by one, ‘compared to Argentina, we are living in Switzerland.’ He chewed, swallowed, dropped in more peanuts. ‘Sweden. Norway.’ More peanuts. ‘Finland.’ He grabbed another handful and tossed them after the others. ‘You have no idea.’
‘It’s hard to believe,’ Brunetti said in what he tried to make sound like a calm voice.
‘I know it is. But trust me.’ He set his glass down and pushed his chair back far enough to allow him to cross his legs without doing himself or the table an injury. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked, reminding Brunetti that he was a man who hated to waste time.
‘I’d like information about Salva Serenissima: I saw your name on the board of directors. But mainly I wanted to see you again and see how you are,’ Brunetti said, knowing it was the truth.
Laughing, Lolo said, ‘Don’t tell me Demetriana’s got her hand in your pocket, too.’ He shook his head in mixed appreciation and exasperation. ‘She’s a wily thing, but I can’t help liking her.’
‘Do you know her well?’
‘I sort of inherited her from my parents,’ Lolo said, sipping his wine. ‘I can’t remember a time when my parents didn’t know them, her and her late husband; she’s almost an aunt by adoption to me.’
‘And Salva Serenissima?’ Brunetti asked.
Lolo leaned back in his chair, raising its front legs from the floor. He crossed his arms and gazed into the far distance as he considered Brunetti’s question. ‘I think it’s her baby.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
Lolo let his chair fall to the ground. ‘Maybe better to say it’s what gives her most satisfaction.’
‘She’s got a son, hasn’t she?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes. Clever fellow, Teo. He’s taken over half of the family businesses and is making his own fortune. Most of it’s out of the country now, and he’s away most of the time. Thailand, Indonesia, India.’ Before Brunetti could ask, he said, ‘He and Demetriana have never understood one another.’
‘Did you know his first wife?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Ah, yes,’ Lolo said, then picked up his glass and emptied it. ‘Barbara.’ He looked around for the waiter and, catching his attention, held up his glass, then glanced at Brunetti, who nodded. ‘Due,’ Lolo called to the waiter.
Lolo rested his elbows on the table and clapped his palms softly together a few times. ‘You know about their daughter?’ he asked.
‘Yes. That’s what I want to talk to you about,’ Brunetti answered.
Lolo’s expression changed, and he looked at Brunetti in long appraisal. ‘Aha, and I thought it was the charm of my personality that led you to call.’
‘That, above all,’ Brunetti answered in the same joking tone. Then, more seriously, ‘I’ve asked the Vice-Questore to open an investigation into what happened to her.’
‘Is that necessary?’
They were interrupted by the waiter, who set down two glasses of white wine and replaced the half-eaten peanuts with a fresh bowl.
Brunetti ignored his glass while telling his friend the few facts he knew, ending with the story of Manuela’s drunken saviour.
Lolo picked up his glass by the stem and turned it around repeatedly before setting it down untasted. ‘Well, he did and he didn’t,’ Lolo said at last, then added immediately, ‘Save her, that is.’ His eyes were on his glass, but Brunetti saw the bleakness that had taken over his face.
‘Have you seen her since then?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What’s she like?’
Lolo drained half his glass. He set it down clumsily, making a loud clack, and said, ‘She’s a lovely woman with a vacant face and is often confused by things. She’s very sweet, but after a while you see that something’s wrong with her.’
With the seriousness that had entered his voice with this description of the woman, Lolo asked, ‘Why are you bothering with this? What’s done is done.’
‘Her grandmother asked me to. She doesn’t want to die without knowing what happened.’
‘What good will that do?’
Brunetti shrugged in answer.
‘But it won’t change anything,’ Lolo said fiercely.
‘It will change what she knows,’ was all that Brunetti could think of saying.
Lolo crossed his arms again and sat for some time, eyes on the far wall, until he finally said, ‘Then it’s not Salva Serenissima you want to know about.’
‘I do. I met some people who are involved with it – or who will be – and I’m curious about their motives, I suppose.’ Brunetti shook his head at the vagueness of this, even to himself. ‘She – the Contessa – wants to leave the city better than she found it. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.’
‘But?’ Lolo asked.
‘But some of the people around her . . . I don’t understand what they want.’
‘Who are they?’
‘An English banker and his companion. I think he’s a fool and she’s not. He seems to want to help, so long as it gets done quickly.’ Brunetti suddenly remembered his wine and took a sip.
‘And he gets the credit for it?’ Lolo asked.
‘Do you know the people I’m talking about?’
‘He’s short and insignificant looking, and she’s got very large brown eyes and doesn’t say much?’ Lolo asked.
Brunetti nodded.
‘You’re right about both of them,’ Lolo agreed, then as quickly asked, ‘But what of it, so long as they give the money and something gets done?’
Brunetti laughed and answered, ‘I see what three months in Argentina have done to you.’
Lolo at first looked surprised, then he tried to look offended, and then he smiled. ‘A lifetime in Venice has done more.’ Brunetti laughed at this, making it unnecessary for Lolo to explain. Instead, he asked Brunetti, ‘Anyone else?’
‘Not among the foreigners.’
‘Who, then?’ Lolo asked and picked up his glass.
‘There was a Venetian at the dinner; he flattered the Contessa terribly. A bit younger than us, beard like the last Tsar.’ Then, reluctantly, because part of him did like the Contessa, Brunetti added, disappointment in his voice, ‘She seemed to like hearing it.’
‘Ah, Vittori,’ was all that Lolo said.
‘Doesn’t he have one of those double-barrelled names?’ Brunetti asked.
Lolo snorted into his glass. When he had recovered, he surprised Brunetti by asking, ‘Tell me the name of someone your father worked for.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The last name of someone who employed your father, for any job at all. Tell me his name.’
Brunetti thought of the fruit and vegetable vendor who had, when his father was in a period of relative calm, given him a job delivering produce to restaurants. ‘Camuffo.’
‘Then you could call yourself Guido Brunetti-Camuffo with as much right.’
‘You mean he invented it?’
Lolo crossed his arms and leaned back. Lapsing into contemplative mode, he stared at the ceiling and then said, ‘I always wonder, if people like him are capable of adding a name to their names, what are they capable of adding to their bills?’ He let his chair slam back to the floor and went on. ‘It’s really closer to the truth to say he borrowed the name,’ Lolo said with barely disguised contempt. ‘His fat
her worked for the Ricciardis: gardener or something. Everybody knows that.’
Brunetti, who hadn’t known, asked, still pondering the thought of having gone through life as Guido Brunetti-Camuffo, ‘But why would he do that?’
Lolo reached across the table and gently ruffled Brunetti’s hair. ‘You’re wonderful, Guido, really wonderful. Your wife has the bluest blood in the city, and still you just don’t get it.’
‘That this stuff is important to people?’ Brunetti asked indignantly.
This time, Lolo actually pushed his chair back until it banged against a chair at the next table. He looked across at his friend and finally said, ‘It’s one of the reasons I love you, Guido, and why you’re such a friend.’
‘Because I don’t understand?’
‘No, because it doesn’t matter to you. What people are called.’ Then, after a pause, ‘What I’m called.’
Brunetti looked at the peanuts and, needing something to do, stuck his finger into the bowl and moved the nuts around, shifting them from one side to the other and then back again. When he had them arranged to his satisfaction, he looked at Lolo and asked, ‘What else can you tell me about him?’
‘Only that Demetriana’s not the only elderly woman he flatters.’
‘To get what from them?’ Brunetti asked, familiar with the race of man.
‘Work. Dinner. Invitations. Trips. Whatever happens to fall from the table, or whatever he can nudge just a little bit until it falls from the table and lands near his feet.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘What do you think he wants from the Contessa?’
‘Work, probably,’ Lolo answered, making it clear that the subject did not interest him much.
‘Can you tell me anything else about the granddaughter?’
Lolo closed his eyes and pulled his lips together, then opened his eyes and said, ‘You know I hate waste, Guido. Doesn’t matter what it is; I just hate to see anything lost or spoiled.’ Brunetti nodded to tell him to go on.
‘That’s what happened with Manuela. She was a sweet, lovely kid. I didn’t see her often, maybe five, six times when she was growing up, when she was at Demetriana’s place. And then suddenly, when she was about fourteen, fifteen, all I knew about her was what Demetriana told me, that she had “problems”, the kind that are never defined.’ He waved a hand in the air. ‘You know how it is when people use that word when they talk about the people close to them: it can be anything: drugs, anorexia, bad friends.’
Brunetti kept his face impassive as he heard his friend read off a list of his own deepest fears.
‘And then it happened, and she was in the hospital, and when she came out, she wasn’t the same.’
The waiter appeared, and Lolo paid him, waving away Brunetti’s offer to contribute. ‘We don’t talk about her, Demetriana and I. Nothing’s going to change. Ever. That’s the waste; her life was tossed away, and nothing’s ever going to change. So there’s nothing to say.’
‘And if anything happens to her mother?’ Brunetti asked.
Lolo thought for a long time, perhaps trying to assess how much he should tell Brunetti. Then he said, ‘She’ll have to stay with her grandmother or her father. Demetriana’s more than eighty, and Teo has a new wife and kids. So I imagine she’ll have to go somewhere. To a place.’ He got to his feet, as did Brunetti.
Outside, in the campo, they exchanged another bearish hug, then Lolo turned back towards San Marco, and Brunetti went out to San Zaccaria to get the vaporetto.
12
Dinner passed quietly. Raffi had gone out for a pizza with Sara Paganuzzi, who was back after a year studying in Paris. It seemed to both Brunetti and Paola that Raffi spoke of her with less enthusiasm than previously. Perhaps it was only Raffi’s nervousness with the beginning of a new academic year, with three new professors and the necessary adjustment to their habits. It could just as easily be the fading of first love’s intoxication: he and Paola could do no more than stand and wait.
Chiara filled the gap created by her brother’s absence by asking her parents if they would let her go to London the following summer with a friend from school to work as a waitress in the restaurant of her friend’s uncle. ‘What do you know about being a waitress?’ Paola, who had been taking part in the conversation from the stove, asked.
‘I know that you’re supposed to serve from the left,’ Chiara said right back, then added, ‘though you always serve me from the right.’
Paola had just turned towards her husband and daughter to bring them their farfalle with radicchio and gorgonzola. She stopped and set the two plates down on the counter beside her and raised her head to address the Spirits of Offended Motherhood. ‘I serve her from the right,’ she said in an entirely conversational voice. ‘From the right, did you hear? While waitresses are supposed to serve from the left.’ She folded her arms and leaned back against the counter. ‘I hope that means she’s recognized that I am not a waitress, but her mother, who gave a three-hour lecture on The Rape of the Lock this morning, after which she sat in a committee meeting for two hours to discuss changes in the pension system for professors at the university.’
Knowing that she had their interest, she looked at them and then returned her attention to whatever Spirits might be circling in the air above them. ‘The universities I’ve attended have failed miserably to prepare me to be a waitress, and thus I’ve gone through life serving from the right. Perhaps I do this because it saves my having to walk around my daughter – who is sitting at the table and waiting to be served – and then return to serve my husband. Who, I might add, is similarly engaged.’ Then, to remove any doubts either one of them – or the Spirits – might have about what Brunetti was doing while sitting there, she explained, ‘Waiting to be served.’
That said, Paola turned and picked up the two dishes and approached the table. From Chiara’s right, she set down the dish, then Brunetti’s, after which she walked back to the stove to prepare her own plate of pasta.
Chiara looked at her father, who held a finger to his lips, enjoining silence. He pointed at his face to tell Chiara to leave it to him to take care of things.
Paola, plate in hand, returned to the table and took her place. She looked across at her daughter and inquired brightly, ‘Did you have a nice day at school today, dear?’
The rest of the meal had been strained, though Chiara did her best to help clear the table, even dried and put away the dishes before going silently to her room to do her homework. Brunetti had left them to work things out between them and gone into the living room to continue reading the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a book he’d let sit ever since he’d struggled through parts of it in Greek in his last year in liceo. He had found an Italian translation in a second-hand bookshop a few weeks before, and he looked forward to being able to read it with less difficulty than it had presented decades ago.
Lolo had been the star pupil in Greek, could read it with the ease with which he read Italian. No one, least of all Lolo, could understand why that was, what place in his brain held the secret of language, for Lolo had the gift in a way Brunetti had seen in no other person. He needed a month to become comfortable in a language and to be able to read it; by the time they left school, he was fluent in English and French, and could read both Latin and Greek with no trouble. Since then, he’d picked up – that was his phrase – German, Spanish, and Catalan. He had once told Brunetti that, after a certain point, he no longer felt that he was translating a language into Italian but was simply reading it as though it were his own language.
When Paola came in, carrying two cups of coffee with spoons upright in them, he said, ‘I saw Lolo this afternoon.’
Her delight was evident and served to banish the scene she had made at dinner. ‘I didn’t know he was here. Where did you see him?’
‘We met for a drink. He’s been in Argentina sorting out some sort
of mess his brother found himself in.’
‘Is he the one with the cows?’
‘Yes. Do you know him?’
‘I knew him in school. We used to do our chemistry homework together.’ She gave the spoon a stir and removed it, then sipped at her coffee. ‘Hopeless. We were both hopeless idiots. God knows how we got through the exam. I’m sure he charmed the teacher into giving him a passing grade: he understood less than I did.’
‘Is that how you got through it? With charm?’ Brunetti asked. It was hard for him to imagine Paola passing an exam in chemistry by any other means.
‘No, I simply memorized the textbook, even though I didn’t have any idea of what it all meant.’ She sipped again.
It had taken Brunetti years to become familiar with her extraordinary memory, and he still found it difficult to believe that she could memorize anything simply by reading it with special attention and telling herself to remember what she read.
‘That’s all any of us had to do. I’ve been suspicious of scientists ever since then.’
‘I know,’ Brunetti said and drank his coffee.
‘Tell me about Lolo,’ she said, coming to sit beside him.
‘He said Argentina makes Italy look like Switzerland.’
‘Oh, my,’ she said. ‘How long is he back for?’
‘I don’t know.’
She turned to stare at him. ‘You don’t see him for more than a year, and you don’t ask him how long he’s staying here?’
‘We talked about other things.’
‘What?’
‘Manuela Lando-Continui,’ he said, although he had not intended to use her full name. Brunetti realized he did it to make her – even if only for the time it took for him to say her name – a person, her own self.
‘Ah, that’s right,’ Paola said, sitting back and resting her head against the cushions. ‘He’s known them all for ever. I think he and Barbara, her mother . . .’
‘He and Barbara what?’ Brunetti asked.
‘There might have been something between them, years ago, when he was at university.’