by Donna Leon
He no longer knew when he had first heard the story, but even before Brunetti reached middle school, Madame Reynard had become legend, as is the destiny of mourning spouses, at least if they are both beautiful and rich. The mysterious French woman never left her palazzo, or she left it at night to walk the streets in silent tears, or she allowed only priests to enter, with whom, draped in her widow’s veil, she recited endless rosaries for the repose of her husband’s soul. Or she was a recluse, crucified by grief. Two elements remained constant in all variants: she was beautiful and she was rich.
And then, more than twenty years ago, aged one hundred, widowed for three-quarters of a century, she died. And her lawyer – who had nowhere appeared in any of the legends – turned out to have inherited the palazzo and all it contained, as well as the lands, the investments, and the patent to a process that did something to the strength of cotton fibres, making them resistant to higher temperatures. Whatever it did – and the cloth changed from cotton to silk to wool, depending on the version told – the patent ended up being immeasurably more valuable than the palazzo or the rest.
‘Of course, of course,’ Brunetti said as the tiny figures in his memory moved together and Maria found her Benito: for those were the names of the witnesses to Madame Reynard’s will – Sartori and Morandi – and as such the subject of gossip and speculation that had occupied the city for months. They had worked in the hospital, had no previous knowledge of the dying woman, were certainly not named as beneficiaries of the will, and so were judged to be extraneous to the matter. Brunetti went back to his desk.
‘Weren’t there some French relatives?’ Vianello asked.
Brunetti rummaged through the stories that had been dislodged in his memory and came up with the one he sought: ‘They turned out not to be relatives but people who had read about her fortune and thought they’d have a try at it.’ He let more information seep in and then added, ‘But yes, they were French.’
Both sat for a while, letting their memories gather up bits and pieces. ‘And wasn’t there an auction?’ Vianello asked.
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said. ‘One of the last great ones. After she died. They sold everything.’ Then, because it was Vianello he was talking to, and he could say such things to him, Brunetti added, ‘My father-in-law said every collector in the city was there. Every collector in the Veneto, for that matter.’ Brunetti knew of two drawings from that auction. ‘He got two pages from a notebook of Giovannino de Grassi.’
Vianello shook his head in ignorance.
‘Fourteenth century. There’s a whole notebook in Bergamo, with drawings – paintings, really – of birds and animals, and a fantasy alphabet.’ His father-in-law kept his two drawings in a folder, out of the light. Brunetti held up his hands about twenty centimetres apart. ‘These are only loose pages, about this big. Beautiful.’
‘Valuable?’ asked the far more pragmatic Vianello.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ Brunetti said. ‘But I’d guess so. In fact, my father-in-law said that most collectors went because of her husband’s collection of drawings – it wasn’t like today, when you could check everything that was in the auction by going online. He said there were always surprises. But this time, the surprise was that there were so few drawings. Still he managed to get those two.’
‘Pity about Cuccetti, isn’t it?’ Vianello asked, surprising Brunetti by remembering the name of the lawyer who had swept the board.
‘What, that he died so soon after? What was it, two years?’
‘I think so. And with his son. The son was driving, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, and drunk. But it was all hushed up.’ Both of them knew a fair bit about this sort of thing. ‘Cuccetti had a lot of important friends,’ Brunetti added.
As if Brunetti’s statement were the night, and his question the day, Vianello asked, ‘The will was never contested, was it?’
‘Only by those French people, and that didn’t last a day.’ Leaning across his desk Brunetti retrieved the papers Signorina Elettra had given him and said, ‘This is what she found.’ He read the first sheet and passed it to Vianello. In amiable silence, neither thinking it necessary to comment, they read through the papers.
Maria Sartori had been a practical nurse, first at the Ospedale al Lido, and then at the Ospedale Civile, from which she had retired more than fifteen years before. Never married, she had lived at the same address as Benito Morandi for most of their adult lives. She had kept an account at the same bank during her working life, into which modest sums were deposited and then withdrawn. She had never been in hospital, nor had she ever come to the attention of the police. And that was all: no mention of joy or sorrow, dreams or disappointments. Decades of work, retirement and a pension, and now a room in a private casa di cura, paid for by her pension and the contribution of her companion.
Attached was a photocopy of her carta d’identità; Brunetti barely recognized the soft-featured woman who gazed out at the world from the photo: surely she could not be the ancestor of the woman with the deeply lined face he had seen. He fought off the temptation to whisper to the younger face how right she had been: trouble comes.
As he handed the second sheet to Vianello, Brunetti turned his attention to her companion. Morandi had served in the Second World War. Brunetti’s first thought was that Morandi must have lied about that, but then he did the numbers and saw that it was just barely possible.
Brunetti’s father had often referred to the chaos that had prevailed during those dreadful years, so he believed that a boy in his early teens might have been allowed to enlist at the very end. But then Brunetti read Morandi’s service record, stating that he had seen service in Abyssinia, Albania, and Greece, where he had been wounded, sent home, and discharged back into civilian life.
‘No, eh?’ Brunetti heard himself say aloud, startling Vianello, who turned to look at him. If the date of birth in this file was true, then Morandi would have gone off to Greece when he was as young as twelve, and he would have been only sixteen when Italy surrendered to the Allies. No matter how eager to name their son ‘Benito’ his family might have been, few families would have allowed their adolescent son to follow the other Benito off to war.
A few years after Morandi’s return – or at least after documentary evidence of his war service had entered the record – he took a job at the port of Venice and remained there for more than a decade, though no more precise job description than ‘manual labourer’ was provided. Brunetti learned that he had been dismissed from this job without explanation.
Some years later, he began working as a cleaner at the Ospedale Civile. Brunetti leaned aside and picked up the papers Vianello had set on his desk; Signora Sartori was already working at the Ospedale by then.
Morandi had worked as a portiere and cleaner for more than two decades and had retired about twenty years before, entitled to a minimal pension.
Brunetti recognized the seal of the Ministry of Justice on the next three sheets of paper, which catalogued Morandi’s relationship with the forces of order, to which he was no stranger. He had first been arrested when he was in his early thirties, charged with selling smuggled cigarettes to tobacco shops on the mainland. Five years later, he was arrested for selling items stolen from ships being unloaded at the port and was given a one-year suspended sentence. Seven years after that he was arrested for having assaulted and seriously injured a colleague at work. When the man failed to testify against him, the charges were dropped. He had also been arrested for resisting arrest and for passing stolen goods to a fence in Mestre. There was some sort of clerical error in the processing of evidence in that case, and after five years it was abandoned, though by then Signor Morandi seemed to have passed to the side of the angels, for he had not been arrested since the time he had begun work at the hospital.
The last sheets of paper concerned Signor Morandi’s life as a fiscal being. About the time of his retirement, Morandi bought an apartment in San Marco without taking out a mortgage t
o do so. A note in Signorina Elettra’s handwriting informed Brunetti that he and Signora Sartori had moved into that apartment soon thereafter, for both of them had changed residence to that address within months of the purchase.
His bank account, completely undisturbed by the purchase of the apartment, showed much the same routine seen in Signora Sartori’s: modest deposits and withdrawals, and, since the purchase of the apartment, the monthly payment of a condominium fee. This fee had risen during the years and was now more than four hundred euros a month and thus could no longer easily be offset by his modest pension.
From the time Signora Sartori had entered the nursing home Signor Morandi’s banking habits had changed. A month before her first bill was due, his account had been credited with a deposit of almost four thousand euros. Since then, every three or four months, a deposit of between four and five thousand euros was made, and each month more than twelve hundred euros was routinely transferred from his account to that of the nursing home.
That seemed to be that. Brunetti leafed back through the papers to check the dates and saw that, though the apartment had been purchased after Morandi’s retirement, Signora Sartori continued working at the hospital. It was unlikely that people holding such jobs could have managed, even jointly, to save enough to buy an apartment: given the absence of a mortgage and the low salary of the one still working, it became almost impossible. Neither Brunetti’s brief meeting with Morandi nor the contents of these papers suggested a man whose behaviour would be characterized by fiscal prudence.
Brunetti got to his feet and went over to the window, resuming his study of the two façades on view. He returned his attention to the wall, considering the report and wondering why it had caught Signorina Elettra’s attention. He knew her well enough to know that all of the information she had acquired would be in these papers: not to provide it would be – he was struck by the word that came to mind – to cheat. He waited for Vianello to conclude his contemplation and pass some observation on the papers.
While he waited, Brunetti considered the phenomenon of retirement. People in other countries, he had been told, dreamed of retirement as a chance to move to a warmer climate and start a whole new chapter: learn a language, buy a scuba outfit, take up taxidermy. How utterly alien that desire was to his own culture. The people he knew and those he had been observing all his life wanted nothing more, upon retirement, than to settle more deeply into their homes and the routines they had constructed over decades, making no change to their lives other than to excise from them the necessity of going to work each morning and perhaps to add the possibility of travelling a bit, but not often, and not too far. He knew no one who had bought a new home upon retirement or who had considered changing address.
What, then, would explain the sudden acquisition, at the conclusion of his working life, of a new apartment by Signor Morandi? Could there be some other Morandi? Was this an error on Signorina Elettra’s part. Error? What was he thinking? Brunetti put his fingers to his mouth, as if to stifle that rash word.
‘Why did he buy an apartment?’ Vianello asked from his side of the room.
‘What did he buy it with?’ Brunetti asked. ‘There’s no mention of a mortgage.’
Vianello returned to his chair, leaned forward to place his palm on the papers, saying, ‘Nothing in here suggests a man who saved all his life to buy a home.’
Brunetti dialled Signorina Elettra’s number.
‘Sì, Commissario?’ she answered.
‘The Inspector and I are curious about how Signor Morandi managed to buy his apartment,’ he said.
She allowed a moment to pass and then asked, ‘Did you see the date of purchase?’
Brunetti raised his shoulder and propped the phone against his ear then used both hands to leaf through the papers. He found the date and said, ‘It’s three months after he retired. But I don’t see why it’s significant.’
‘Perhaps if you looked at the date of Madame Reynard’s death,’ she suggested.
He found the copy of her death certificate and saw that Morandi had bought the apartment exactly one month after her death. He made a noise.
When no comment or question followed, she asked, ‘Did you see the name of the person selling the apartment?’
He looked. He said, ‘Matilda Querini.’ He caught Vianello’s confused glance and switched on the speaker, then replaced the receiver.
Again, he did not comment. ‘You and the Inspector don’t remember the case, then?’ she asked.
‘I remember that those people witnessed it and that Cuccetti inherited the lot.’
‘Ah,’ she said, drawing the syllable out and letting it end on a dying fall.
‘Tell me,’ Brunetti said.
‘Matilda Querini was his wife.’
‘Ah, his wife,’ Brunetti let himself say in conscious imitation. Then, a few heartbeats later, he asked, ‘Is she still alive?’
‘No. She died six years ago.’
‘Wealthy?’
‘Money without limit.’
‘And where did it go? The son was the only child, wasn’t he?’
‘Rumour has it that she left it to the Church.’
‘Only rumour, Signorina?’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Fact. She left it to the Church.’ Before he could ask, she explained, ‘I have a friend who works in the Patriarch’s office. I called and asked him, and he told me it was the biggest sum they’ve ever been left.’
‘Did he say how much?’
‘I thought it impolite to ask.’ Vianello made a small moaning noise.
‘So?’ he asked, knowing she’d be unable to leave something like that alone.
‘So I asked my father. Her money wasn’t at his bank, but he knows the director of the one where it was, and he asked him.’
‘Do I want to know?’
‘Seven million euros, give or take a few hundred thousand. And the patent for that process, and at least eight apartments.’
‘To the Church?’ Brunetti asked, at the sound of which question Vianello put his head, rather melodramatically, in his hands and shook it violently from side to side.
‘Yes,’ she answered.
An idea came to him and he asked, ‘Have you looked at Cuccetti and his wife’s bank accounts?’ For her to do so was for her to break the law. For him to know that she had done so and then do nothing was for him to break the law.
‘Of course,’ she answered.
‘Let me guess,’ Brunetti said, unable to resist the temptation to show off a little, ‘there was no money put into either account after the sale?’
‘Nothing,’ she answered. ‘Of course, she may have given Morandi the apartment from the goodness of her heart,’ she said, her tone excluding this possibility a priori.
‘Cuccetti’s reputation makes that unlikely, wouldn’t you say?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, then added, ‘But it also makes his wife’s decision to leave it all to the Church …’ she began and then paused to search for the suitable word.
‘Grotesque?’ Brunetti suggested.
‘Ah,’ she said in appreciation of the justness of his choice.
22
Brunetti filled Vianello in on the missing half of his conversation with Signorina Elettra. ‘I shouldn’t laugh, I know,’ Vianello said, sober-faced, ‘but the thought that everything that greedy old bastard Cuccetti stole during his miserable life ended up in the pockets of the Church is …’ He gave a resigned nod, either in admiration or astonishment, and said, ‘Like them or not, you have to admit they’re the best.’
‘The priests?’
‘Priests. Nuns. Monks. Bishops. You name them. They’ll have their snouts in the soup before you set the plate on the table. They got to her in the end, and they sucked it all up. My compliments to them,’ he said, shaking his head in what Brunetti took to be real – however grudging – admiration.
Deciding he had nothing to oppose that sentiment, Brunetti suggested they would
both be better off at home with their families, an opinion in which Vianello joined him. They left the Questura together, going their separate ways just outside the front door.
Brunetti decided to walk, needing the sense of motion and freedom that came from moving through the city without having to give conscious thought to where he was going. Memory and imagination, tranquillized by walking, floated back to consider the names Cuccetti and Reynard. The first brought only a sense of vague distaste, while the second brought pathos and loss.
He paused at the bottom of the Rialto and reeled in his thoughts. The prospect of walking home along the less crowded riva appealed to him, but he decided to go down to Biancat and get Paola some flowers: it had been an age since he had. He found the florist closed. Having got the idea of flowers in his head, he was irritated – more than that – not to be able to take them to Paola. He stood in front of the window and looked at the irises he wanted, a white plastic cylinder of them visible behind the humidity-clouded window, beautiful and all the more desirable because he could not have them. ‘How like a man,’ he muttered to himself and turned away and down his own calle. He was on time; that would have to take the place of flowers.
Brunetti was not a man of faith, at least not in a way that posited a supreme being that concerned itself with the doings of men: as a policeman, Brunetti knew enough about the doings of men to make him hope the deity would be warned away from them in search of some more rewarding species. But at odd times during his life he found himself racked with a sense of limitless gratitude: it could come upon him at any time, and it always leaped upon him with maximum surprise. This evening it hit him as he turned into the last flight of steps leading to the apartment. He was healthy, he didn’t think he was crazy or violent, he had a wife he loved to the point of folly, two children in whom he had invested every hope of happiness on this earth. And, to date, misery and pain and privation and sickness had stayed outside the ring of fire he liked to think encircled them. What he thought of as primitive superstition kept him wary of daring to make any conscious expression of gratitude: to do so was to invite disaster. And to think like this, he knew, was to be a primitive fool.