Unto Us a Son Is Given

by Donna Leon

  ‘No one I know has ever stayed there, so there’s no reason I’d go, not really.’

  ‘Not even to meet someone for a drink?’ Brunetti prodded.

  ‘Commissario, I have no idea why you’re so insistent in linking me to this hotel where I’ve never been and where I did not know Signora Dodson was staying,’ Torrebardo said, finally loosening his hold on his anger.

  Brunetti turned his hand up and gave a weak smile. ‘I’m simply trying to exclude the possibility of your involvement in this, Signore.’

  ‘Well, you can do that without this cross-examination, Commissario. I give you my word as a nobleman that I’ve never been in the hotel, that I did not see Alberta Dodson while she was in Venice this time, and that I had nothing to do with her death.’

  ‘“La nobiltà ha dipinta negli occhi l’onestà“,’ Brunetti whispered.

  ‘Exactly,’ Torrebardo said, failing to recognize the reference and deaf to Brunetti’s irony.

  ‘Well, then,’ Brunetti said, pushing his chair back from his desk. Seeing this, Torrebardo had put his hands on the arms of his chair and started to stand, but when he saw that Brunetti remained seated, he lowered himself back.

  ‘Is there something else?’ Torrebardo asked.

  ‘Yes, there is,’ Brunetti said. Unexpectedly, his thoughts turned to an email in the folder, from Berta to Gonzalo, written months before his death, in which she had reproved her friend for the step he had taken, saying that it saddened her immeasurably to see him, at his age, so consumed by lust as to betray even the object of that lust.

  In the next paragraph, she had said that she was beyond the lust that still held Gonzalo captive and lusted only to understand and caress Roderick’s thoughts and spirit as he confronted the devastation that was slowly consuming his life.

  Brunetti had stopped reading then, the force of taboo rendering him incapable of prying any deeper into her thoughts and spirit. He returned his attention to il Marchese di Torrebardo.

  ‘I’d like to discuss the lies you’ve told me about where you were on Thursday evening and talk about the reason you killed Signora Dodson.’ Watching the shock plaster itself across Torrebardo’s face, only to disappear immediately, driven off by force of will, Brunetti added, ‘The wife of Gonzalo Rodríguez de Tejeda.’

  ‘You can’t prove …’ Torrebardo said, giving in to his rage for just long enough to pronounce three words and then immediately closing his lips and pulling them into his mouth, as though that would somehow erase what he had just said.

  Brunetti took his phone and dialled the number of Magistrato Baldassare. ‘Petra,’ he said when she answered. ‘Do you have them?’

  ‘They’ve been sent to Signorina Zorzi as an attachment, so you can act on them now. There’s also a hard copy – signed and with the proper office seals – on its way by courier.’

  ‘Grazie, Petra,’ he permitted himself to say, not wanting Torrebardo to have any idea of what he was talking about.

  ‘Signor Torrebardo,’ he said, finished with using the title or showing any deference to a man he was about to arrest for murder, ‘I can prove. I have proof that you were in the hotel the night of the murder.’

  This time, Torrebardo’s mouth fell open in surprise, and Brunetti saw how his teeth matched the other perfections of his face. It was about time for him to protest that he didn’t understand what Brunetti was talking about, but he disappointed Brunetti by asking, ‘Am I allowed to call a lawyer?’

  ‘Sì,’ Brunetti answered.

  Suddenly deferential, Torrebardo asked, ‘May I use my own phone?’

  ‘Of course,’ Brunetti agreed.

  Torrebardo took out his phone and found the number he wanted. Brunetti listened to it ring: it was picked up on the third ring.

  ‘Nanni, it’s Attilio,’ Torrebardo began, fighting to control his voice. The other man said something, and Torrebardo said, ‘I don’t know. I think I’m being arrested.’ He listened quietly for an instant and said, ‘No, it’s for something I didn’t do. That woman who was killed in the hotel. They think I did it.’ Brunetti could hear Nanni’s voice but kept his head down and pulled his desk calendar close to study it.

  ‘I know you don’t do criminal law. But can you give me the name of someone who does?’ This time the pause was longer until he said, ‘It doesn’t matter what he costs. That doesn’t matter, either. I can borrow it.’ He listened for a longer time, crossed and re-crossed his legs, and then said, voice veering towards anger, ‘Nanni, I’m not asking for your advice. I’m asking you to recommend a criminal lawyer. Give me the name of the best, and I’ll take care of it.’ Torrebardo used his other hand to dip into the pocket of his coat.

  Brunetti got up and walked to the window, not wanting to be asked to give him pencil and paper. On the far side of the canal the end of the vine was submerged in the water, he noticed.

  He ignored the fumbling sounds behind him and pretended not to hear the phone fall on the floor, nor Torrebardo’s obscenity. After a moment, Torrebardo snapped, ‘All right. Give it to me.’ There was silence, and then there was more silence. ‘d’Acquarone?’ There was a brief pause, no doubt as Torrebardo wrote down the name. Then the young man snapped out, ‘I don’t care if he’s in Verona. If he’s the best, I want him.’

  Brunetti heard something hit the desk, and when he looked back at Torrebardo he saw him sitting with his head lowered, hand covering his phone, which he’d apparently slapped down on Brunetti’s desk.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the younger man said, not looking up. His voice had grown somehow smaller.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is there a bathroom up here?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Wait a moment and I’ll have someone sent up who can take you there.’

  Torrebardo raised his head as Brunetti walked to his desk, and Brunetti saw the terror in his eyes as he thought about his future. Brunetti dialled the number of the front desk and said, ‘Send an officer to my office. Quickly.’

  He walked back to the window and stood, thinking about weakness. In the truly weak, it was the object of pity, while in the arrogant it most frequently educed contempt, as was the case now.

  After about three minutes, Bassi appeared at the door, and Brunetti asked him to accompany the gentleman to the toilet – he intentionally used that word – wait for him, and bring him back. Torrebardo pushed himself to his feet and followed the officer, walking with what appeared to be some discomfort.

  Brunetti turned back to face the room, and his eye fell on Torrebardo’s coat. The video was clear, and if there were traces of Berta Dodson’s DNA on that coat, there would be very little for Avvocato d’Acquarone to do. Brunetti had the warrant, and now he had the coat.

  His thoughts turned to Gonzalo, the father of all of this. Brunetti had always thought he loved the Spaniard; after all, Brunetti had married into a family of people who loved him. But now he found that he felt nothing for Gonzalo beyond pity. He had known Gonzalo was selfish and a fool about young men, but he had always seen those as weaknesses and never bothered to question Gonzalo’s character because of them. ‘Oh, that’s just Gonzalo.’

  But now his weaknesses had destroyed the two people he cared about the most. Brunetti could no longer attribute to Gonzalo the capacity to love, at least not in a way that he could understand that word. And because of that, his own love for the man had been dismissed or banished, or had simply died.

  How strange, Brunetti reflected: we choose to love people despite their flaws and weaknesses. We train ourselves to overlook or ignore them; sometimes these failures of character even fill us with a special kind of tenderness that has nothing whatsoever in it of a sense of superiority.

  Like bombs, these flaws tick quietly through our lives, and theirs, until we learn to ignore them, and then forget them. Until some unlikely impossibility causes them to explode, when finally we recognize how dangerous these people are and have been all along.

  If Gonzalo had not told Berta of the
adoption, if she had not come to Venice, if and if and if, there would have been no explosion, and Brunetti would remember his late friend Gonzalo with love and laugh fondly at what a goose he could be about young men.

  Even now, remembering Gonzalo’s frequent kindness, his habitual generosity, his love for his and Paola’s children, Brunetti felt his heart begin to warm towards him. He thought of something his mother had often said. Brunetti used to think she was talking about his father when she said it, but as he grew older, he began to suspect she was speaking in general. ‘It would be nice if we could choose the people we love, but love chooses them.’

  He heard a noise, and when he looked, he saw Bassi at the door, bringing back the man Brunetti was about to charge with murder.