by Donna Leon
He paused to give Brunetti the chance to ask, and he did. ‘What did you tell her?’
Torrebardo made no effort to hide his surprise. ‘That I’d come, of course,’ he said, turning the surprise into astonishment that anyone could ask such a question. Then, seeing Brunetti’s expression, he added, ‘He was my father.’
Brunetti lowered his head and nodded a few times, then asked, ‘Then you didn’t get to see her?’
‘No. In fact, I’m sorry now. My father adored her.’ When Brunetti said nothing, the younger man went on, ‘It’s tragic, that she’d come here to do him honour and something so horrible should happen to her.’
Brunetti looked at the surface of his desk and let the moment pass. ‘The night she was killed, could you tell me where you were?’ he asked.
‘It was Thursday, wasn’t it?’ Torrebardo asked.
‘She arrived on Thursday, yes,’ Brunetti said. ‘And she was killed that same night.’
Torrebardo looked down at his knees, as if unsure how to remember where he had been. ‘I was home,’ he said. ‘I’d had an invitation to dinner, but I cancelled it because I had a migraine and didn’t want to go out or have to talk to people.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said, pulling a pad towards him. ‘Could you tell me who the host or hostess was?’
‘Conte Fabrizio Urbino,’ Torrebardo said, almost as if he were happy to have such a name to throw at Brunetti. ‘We were at school together, and he was here for a few days. I called him at his hotel and told him I had to cancel.’
‘And where does Conte Urbino live?’ Brunetti asked.
‘In Milano, but I don’t know the address.’
Torrebardo pulled out his phone and clicked a few keys, then read out the Conte’s phone number to Brunetti, who wrote it down and thanked him.
‘Thank you for your cooperation,’ Brunetti said, pushing himself to his feet.
Torrebardo failed to hide his surprise. He stood and stepped forward to shake Brunetti’s hand, started to say something – perhaps to thank him – but changed his mind and said nothing. He made his way to the door, and let himself out of Brunetti’s office.
26
So that was Gonzalo’s son, the young man his friend had watched with ‘shark’s eyes’, the young man who had swept it all up: the apartment, the bank accounts in ‘somewhere’, the paintings, the prints, everything Gonzalo had owned at the moment he fell forward to his death while on his way to look at paintings.
Conte Falier, his oldest friend, had tried in vain to talk to Gonzalo about what he was planning; his lawyer had ceased attempting to dissuade him; Brunetti wanted not to be involved; while Berta, his best friend, had persisted over the course of months, trying to make him see his own life with his other eyes, the human ones. And now she was dead, as was Gonzalo.
Brunetti opened the drawer of his desk and pulled out the folder Signorina Elettra had given him containing the print-outs of the emails between Gonzalo and Berta. And there it was again, reference to something that ‘we’ both knew that would prevent Gonzalo from doing what he wanted to do, presumably the adoption. ‘We alone know you cannot do this.’ Brunetti told himself to stop inventing plots to discover who the other side of the ‘we’ might be and simply assume the easiest: it was Gonzalo, and Berta, who was writing to him, completed the ‘we’. What could they two have known that would prevent him from adopting il Marchese?
If they were both dead, then the secret would lie silent with them. Unless … unless … someone else had learned what it was … Brunetti dismissed this possibility as the stuff of bad movies: letters discovered after death; long-lost children stepping forward; the map to the hidden will placed inside the family bible and discovered only at the funeral, when a passage was to be read from that bible. Berta was willing to risk disgrace in order to stop the adoption. Had she risked death, instead?
He returned to reading and found again Berta’s warning that the person Gonzalo adopted – never named in this correspondence – might be disillusioned after Gonzalo’s death. What greater disillusion than to discover there was little to inherit? Had lust driven Gonzalo to this sort of deceit? Brunetti, suddenly recalling his conversation with Nanni, realized that there was, in fact, no question about the extent of Gonzalo’s wealth nor about the person for whom it was intended.
Brunetti leaned forward and picked up the phone. He looked at the paper on his desk and dialled the number he’d been given for Conte Fabrizio Urbino, who confirmed what Torrebardo had told him. Urbino displayed no curiosity whatsoever that the police should be calling him to check on Torrebardo’s story, and Brunetti was left to wonder whether it was because people like that did not care what the police did or thought or because he did not want to be involved in any way with what Torrebardo might have to do with the police.
There was a knock at his door. ‘Avanti,’ Brunetti called and was pleased to see Signorina Elettra open the door, some papers in her right hand.
‘Signore,’ she said as she approached his desk, ‘I’ve just had an email from the Spanish police.’ Her voice was not the same; he found himself thinking she sounded stunned, like someone who has suddenly come upon an accident, smoke still rising from the wrecked cars.
‘Tell me,’ Brunetti said.
She held up the papers, as if she wanted to demonstrate the source and validity of what she was going to say. ‘They were married.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Brunetti said, not understanding.
‘Your friend Gonzalo and Signora Dodson; they were married. That’s how she got out of Chile.’
She placed the papers on his desk, but Brunetti barely saw them, nor paid much attention to her as thoughts assailed him. Signora Dodson had said more than once that Gonzalo had saved her life. Rudy joked that they behaved like an old married couple.
‘When?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Where?’
‘In the Spanish Embassy in Santiago, the year after Pinochet took power,’ she answered.
‘But she’s married to her Englishman,’ Brunetti protested.
Her response was calm. ‘So it would seem. But the Spanish can find no record of her divorce.’
‘What’s that worth?’ Brunetti asked, tone flirting with condescension.
Signorina Elettra’s voice changed as she said, ‘If you’re looking for someone to accuse of being bad at record keeping, Signore, Spain is not the place to cast your eye. In fact, they responded almost immediately when we told them that a Spanish national, Alberta Gutiérrez de Vedia, had been murdered here.’
Signorina Elettra paused to give him the chance to ask about this, but when Brunetti failed to speak, she went on. ‘I sent them a copy of our documentation.’ Before he could ask, she added, ‘All of it. And I asked them to give me any information they had about her.’
‘You’ve dealt with them before, haven’t you?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes, but never with this office,’ she said, hesitated, then added, ‘It’s not like it is here, Dottore. The person who gives the information doesn’t have to be the cousin of your brother-in-law or someone you went to elementary school with.’
Brunetti nodded to encourage her to continue. ‘They had records of her marriage to a Spanish national in Chile and the concurrent application for citizenship, then of her emigration to Spain. They had the date when citizenship was granted and when and where she lived and voted in Spanish elections after that, and then her address in England.’ Signorina Elettra paused and then repeated, quite unnecessarily, ‘They can find no record of her divorce.’
To Brunetti, it was as if the horizon had suddenly shifted to a new place and he was being asked to examine the new arrangement. ‘That means he’s not adopted, doesn’t it?’ he asked.
‘If I remember the law correctly, Signore, no, he isn’t,’ she said. It wasn’t necessary that she spell it out to him – the law was both clear and wise: the adoption of an adult by a married person was valid only if both husband and wife agreed to it.
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��Thank you,’ Brunetti said and slid the papers towards him. He didn’t hear her leave, so fierce was his desire to read the documents. He read the first three pages twice but still failed to understand what he was reading, though the vocabulary of bureaucratic Spanish was markedly similar to the Italian. He knew the dates, recognized the names, but he could not concentrate on the facts because of the shadow they cast on what was to come later.
He stood and went to the window and studied the sky, seeking, perhaps, illumination there. He found none, nor in the canal beneath his window.
Finally he broke the code of the documents and pieced together the chronology, then added his own facts. Berta had been of an age to believe in the efficacy of political protest; Pinochet’s officials learned her name and came looking for her; Gonzalo did the gentlemanly thing and saved the damsel in distress, defeating the dragons in Chile by marrying and carrying the princess off to Spain. They had remained friends and perhaps decided to forget the marriage. After all, who would remember the marriage between – Brunetti had to look at the papers – Alberta Gutiérrez de Vedia and Gonzalo Rodríguez de Tejeda in the midst of martial law, political tumult, and thousands of unexplained disappearances? Time passes, governments change, people forget.
Who would ever have imagined that the self-confidently gay art dealer would have a wife, especially one who was apparently married to an English nobleman and who had ridden to hounds?
To the Spanish police, however, Berta Dodson was still Alberta Gutiérrez de Vedia, wife, and then – very briefly – widow, of Gonzalo Rodríguez de Tejeda. Thus she, not Gonzalo’s fraudulently adopted son, would be his heir. Brunetti found himself wondering who her heirs would be but no sooner thought it than backed away from the idea. It didn’t matter, and there was nothing that could make it matter.
Memory mugged him, and he found himself thinking about The Trojan Women again and about the Greeks and what animated them. How different were their motives, how absent the thought of material gain. They defended their honour, both men and women; they defended it with violence or cunning or some combination of both, but not for gain. Clytemnestra did not kill Agamemnon to inherit the house, and Medea was not interested in Jason’s wealth. He remembered a speech in one of the plays; he couldn’t remember which one. He recalled only the disgust felt by a character who thought another had been animated by the desire for profit. No baser motive could be imagined.
And here we were, two thousand years later, and greed was the common denominator of human action.
He went back to his desk, muttering, ‘Follow the money. Follow the money.’ Surely, he was a man of his times.
The trail led to il Marchese di Torrebardo, the person who would have profited from her death. If only she had been Gonzalo’s best friend and nothing more, she might have been spared. The list of might be’s was discouragingly long.
Brunetti imagined the scene in which he attempted to persuade a magistrate that the flash he’d seen in the eyes of il Marchese di Torrebardo was evidence of his involvement in Berta’s death, and turned away from the idea in embarrassment.
For no better reason than to have something to do, he decided to go and talk to the waiter again and see if he could, having had time to think about it, remember anything about the man in the booth.
The day was enticing and pulled at his senses, tempting him to walk along the riva, but Brunetti chose to take the vaporetto and got off at San Tomà, the stop nearest the hotel. He was quickly there and walked into the half-filled bar, where he saw the waiter standing with his back against the bar.
He nodded and half smiled as Brunetti approached the bar. ‘Bon dí, Commissario,’ he said.
Sandro, the bartender, approached their end of the bar and asked Brunetti, ‘May I offer you something, Signore?’
‘I’m on duty,’ Brunetti answered. When he saw the man’s surprise, he smiled and said, ‘Well, maybe a glass of white wine. It’s after five, and I don’t have to go back to the Questura.’
‘Pinot Grigio?’ the bartender asked.
‘Yes. Thanks.’
In response to a waved hand from one of three women sitting at a table near the window, the waiter went over to take their order.
‘Is there something you forgot to ask?’ the bartender asked as Brunetti sipped at his wine.
He’d come to talk to the waiter, but Brunetti decided he might as well include the bartender in his curiosity. ‘I’d like to ask both of you if you’ve remembered anything about the person who was with Signora Dodson in the booth.’
The bartender picked up a cloth from the counter below him and wiped at the surface of the bar a few times. Then he rinsed the cloth in running water, wrung it out, and draped it over the tap. ‘May I ask you something, sir?’
‘Of course.’
‘You think the man in the booth with her was the man who killed her?’
Brunetti considered answering for some time before he said, ‘It’s possible.’ He took another sip of wine and wished he had something to eat with it. Peanuts, perhaps.
As if he’d read Brunetti’s mind, the bartender opened a drawer and pulled out a bowl of salted almonds. He slid them towards Brunetti and nodded. ‘They’re nice with white wine.’ His face softened, Brunetti noticed, as often happens when a person offers someone food.
Brunetti picked up a few almonds and placed two in his mouth, wondering why we always ate almonds one or two at a time and didn’t fling them into our mouths with the reckless abandon with which we treated peanuts. They were very nice.
The waiter came back and said, ‘Three champagnes.’ Turning to Brunetti, he asked, using the plural, ‘Am I allowed to ask if you’ve found out anything?’
Brunetti took another small sip, set the glass on the counter, and said, ‘Yes, you’re allowed to ask, and no, we haven’t found anything.’
‘Sandro and I were talking about it,’ the waiter said, tilting his head in the direction of the bartender, who was at the other end of the bar, unwrapping the cork on a bottle of champagne.
‘Either of you think of anything?’ Brunetti asked casually.
‘Well,’ said the waiter, and then allowed himself time to pause by casting his glance across at the tables. When there was no sign from anyone there, he went on hesitantly, ‘I don’t know if they told you about the video cameras.’
‘Yes, they did, and we looked at them,’ Brunetti said. ‘Nothing.’
‘You looking for anyone in particular?’ the waiter asked.
This, Brunetti reflected, is how privileged information ended up on the front page of Il Gazzettino. To answer this man’s question would be to reveal information to which only the police were privy.
‘Yes. We have someone in mind.’
The waiter started to say something, stopped, looked back at the tables, at Brunetti, and asked, ‘The guy in the booth?’
Brunetti smiled and gave a slight nod, as if to indicate his approval of the man’s cleverness without actually answering his question.
The bartender came back with three flutes held in the triangle of his hands. He set them on the waiter’s tray; the waiter moved them apart from one another and told his colleague, ‘They gave him some videos, but there was nothing there.’
He shrugged, picked up the tray, and moved off towards the table where the three women were sitting. The bartender wiped the counter down again, and Brunetti ate a few more almonds.
When the waiter returned, he again leaned back against the bar and gave a sigh of relief. ‘You don’t know what it does to your back to be on your feet for so many hours.’ He put his hands on his hips and leaned forward, then twisted from side to side. When he was upright again, Brunetti gave a sympathetic nod.
The other two men exchanged a look that Brunetti did not understand. After a moment, the bartender asked, ‘They give you all of them?’
‘There was one from the front desk, looking at the door, and then one from the door to the front desk,’ Brunetti said. ‘There was an
other in here,’ he began and twisted around and glanced up to look for the camera. ‘There, that one up there,’ he said, pointing to a single glass eye that peered out, almost invisible, from the moulding above the mirror on the back wall of the bar. ‘And there was one of the staircase going upstairs from the lobby.’
‘That’s all?’ the bartender asked, sounding faintly puzzled.
‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered.
‘Ah.’ The bartender sighed and looked at the waiter. From the side of his eye, Brunetti caught a slight motion of the waiter’s head but kept his own attention trained on the bartender, who finally said, ‘There’s another one.’
‘They probably didn’t want to tell him,’ the waiter said to no one in particular.
Brunetti decided not to ask and to see what they would tell him, knowing that they now had no choice.
‘I suppose I ought to be the one to tell him,’ the waiter said. The bartender took his cloth and wiped the bar again. Brunetti picked up his glass to let him clean under it.
‘It happened about five months ago, just at the beginning of winter,’ the waiter said. ‘There were still a lot of guests – there always are now – so we were pretty busy.’
The bartender, not bothering to rinse his cloth, draped it over the edge of the sink and stepped back from the bar. He folded his arms.
‘I was on duty one night,’ the waiter continued, ‘and it suddenly came to me that two men had been in the bar on a couple of weekends – I hadn’t paid them any notice because that’s when there were even more people and we had a lot of work. One of them was sort of blonde, and the other one had very curly red hair. I’d guess they’re both in their twenties. Anyway, they were here Friday and Saturday nights. I recognized the blonde one because he worked in a clothing shop across the street from my house. I knew him but didn’t know him, if you see what I mean.’
He paused to give Brunetti the chance to comment. Brunetti nodded but said nothing. Venice was filled with people he knew but didn’t know.
‘The one I recognized caught my attention. Why didn’t he go to the bar in our neighbourhood where he knew people? And how was he paying for the drinks here – I know what they cost – when he worked in a clothing shop?’ There was a more than mild tone of irritation under the waiter’s voice, surely out of proportion to a salesman’s presence in the bar of an expensive hotel.