A Noble Radiance

by Donna Leon

  Brunetti was spared from further reflection by the end of the ceremony. Four middle-aged men carried the coffin from the altar towards the back of the church. Close behind them followed Count Ludovico and Maurizio, the Contessa supported between them. Francesca Salviati was not present. Brunetti was saddened to realize that almost all of the mourners who trailed out of the church were elderly people, apparently friends of the parents. It was as if Roberto had been robbed not only of his future life but of his past, for he had left behind no friends to come and wish him farewell or to say some prayer for his long-departed spirit. How immeasurably sad, to have mattered so little, to have his passing marked by no more than a mother's tears. His own death, Brunetti realized, would pass unmarked even by those: his mother, bound within her madness, was long beyond the time when she could distinguish between son or father, life or death. And what if the coffin were to hold all that remained of his own son?

  Brunetti stepped suddenly into the aisle and joined the trickle of people making towards the door of the church. On the steps, he was surprised to see the sunlight pouring down on the campo, the people trailing past on their way to Campo San Luca or Rialto, utterly unmoved by thoughts of Roberto Lorenzoni or his death.

  He decided not to follow the coffin to the water's edge and see it placed upon the boat that would carry it to the cemetery. Instead, he went back towards San Lio and the Questura, stopping on the way for a coffee and a brioche. He finished the coffee but could eat only one bite of the brioche. He put it down on the counter, paid, and left;

  He went up to his office, where he found a postcard from his brother on his desk. On the front was a photo of the Fountain of Trevi and on the back, in Sergio's neat square lettering, this message: ‘Paper a success, both of us heroes’ followed by his scrawled name, and then a scribbled addition: 'Rome dreadful, squalid.'

  Brunetti tried to see if the cancellation of the stamp bore a date. If it did, it was too smeared for him to be able to read it He marvelled that the postcard could have arrived from Rome in less than a week, he had had letters take three to get to him from Torino. But perhaps the post office gave priority to postcards, or perhaps they preferred them, as they were smaller and lighter. He read through the rest of his mail, some of it important, none of it interesting.

  Signorina Elettra was at the table by her window, arranging irises in a tall vase that stood in a bar of light that splashed across the table and the floor. She wore a sweater almost the same colour as the flowers, stood as slim and straight as they.

  'They're very beautiful’ he said as he came in.

  'Yes, they are, aren't they? But I've always wondered why the cultivated ones have no scent.'

  ‘Don't they?'

  'Very little’ she answered. 'Just smell them.' She moved to one side.

  Brunetti bent forward. They had no scent at all, other than a faintly generic odour of vegetable.

  Before he could remark on this, however, a voice behind him asked, 'Is that a new investigative technique, Commissario?'

  Lieutenant Scarpa's voice purred with curiosity. When Brunetti straightened up and glanced towards him, Scarpa's face was a mask of respectful attention.

  'Yes, Lieutenant,' he answered. 'Signorina Elettra was just telling me that, because they're so pretty, it's very difficult to tell when they're rotten. So you have to smell them. And then you know.'

  'And are they rotten?' Lieutenant Scarpa asked with every appearance of interest.

  'Not yet,' interrupted Signorina Elettra, moving in front of the Lieutenant and back towards her desk. She paused a short distance from Scarpa and ran her eyes up and down his uniform. 'If s harder to tell with flowers’ She stepped past him and went back to her desk. Then, with a smile as false as his, she asked, 'And was there something you wanted. Lieutenant?'

  'The Vice-Questore asked me to come up,' he answered, voice thick with emotion.

  Then by all means go in,' she said, waving towards the door to Patta's office. Saying nothing, Scarpa walked in front of Brunetti, knocked once on the door, and went in without waiting to be told to do so.

  Brunetti waited for the door to close before saying, 'You should be careful of him’

  'Him?' she asked, no attempt made to disguise her contempt.

  'Yes, of him’ Brunetti repeated. 'He's got the Vice-Questore's ear.'

  She reached forward and picked up a brown leather notebook. 'And I've got his appointment book. That cancels things out.'

  ‘I wouldn't be so sure’ Brunetti insisted. 'He could be dangerous.'

  'Take his gun away and he's no different from any other "terron maleducato"'.'

  Brunetti wasn't sure if it was correct for him to countenance both disrespect for a lieutenant's rank and racist remarks about his place of origin. Then he recalled that it was Scarpa they were talking about and let it pass. 'Signorina, did you ever speak to your boyfriend's brother about Roberto Lorenzoni?'

  'Yes, I did, Dottore. I'm sorry but I forgot to tell you.'

  Brunetti found it interesting that she appeared more troubled by this than about her comments on Lieutenant Scarpa. 'What did he say?'

  'Not much. Maybe that's why I forgot. All he said was that Roberto was lazy and spoiled and that he got through school by reading other students' notes.'

  'Nothing else?'

  'Only that Edoardo told me Roberto was always getting into trouble because he kept putting his nose into other people's business - you know, going to other students' houses and opening drawers and looking through their things. He sounded almost proud of him. He said once Roberto arranged to get locked into the school building after school one day and went through all the teachers' desks.'

  'Why did he do that, to steal things?' 'Oh, no. He just wanted to see what they had.' 'Were they still in touch when Roberto was kidnapped?'

  'No, not really. Edoardo was doing his military service. In Modena. He said they hadn't seen one another for more than a year when it happened. But he said he liked him.'

  Brunetti had no idea what to make of any of this, but he thanked Signorina Elettra for the information, decided against warning her again about Lieutenant Scarpa, and went back up to his office.

  He looked down at the letters and reports on his desk and pushed them aside. He sat and pulled the bottom drawer open with the toe of his right foot, then crossed his feet on top of it. He folded his arms on his chest and glanced off at the space above the wooden wardrobe that stood against one wall. He tried to summon up some emotion for Roberto, and it was at the thought of him locked into school and poking through his teachers' desks that Brunetti finally began to have a real sense of this dead boy. It took no more than that, a consciousness of his inexplicable humanity, and Brunetti finally found himself moved to that terrible pity for the dead with which his life was too often filled. He thought of the things that could have happened in Roberto's life; he might have found work he liked, a woman to love; he might have had a son.

  The family died with him; at least the direct line from Count Ludovico. Brunetti knew that the Lorenzonis could trace themselves back into the dim centuries where history and myth blended and became one, and he wondered what it must be to see it end. Antigone, he remembered, said that the chief horror of her brothers' deaths lay in the fact that her parents could never again have children, and so the family died with those bodies rotting under the walls of Thebes.

  He turned his thoughts to Maurizio, now the presumptive heir to the Lorenzoni empire. Though the boys had been raised together, there was no evidence of any great affection or love between them. Maurizio's devotion seemed entirely directed at his aunt and uncle. That would make it unlikely he would deliver such a terrible blow as to rob them of their only child. But Brunetti had heard enough of the limitless self-justification of criminals to know that it would be the work of an instant for Maurizio to convince himself it would be an act of charity and love to provide them with a diligent, devoted, hard-working heir, someone who would so fully live up to their
expectations of what a son should be, that the loss of Roberto would soon cease to pain them. Brunetti had heard worse.

  He called down to Signorina Elettra to ask if she had found the name of the girl whose hand Maurizio had broken. She told him it was given on a separate page at the end of the list of the Lorenzoni financial holdings. Brunetti turned to the final pages. Maria Teresa Bonarnini, with an address in Castello.

  He called the number and asked for Signorina Bonamini, and the woman who answered said she was at work. When asked, making no attempt to discover who was calling, she told Brunetti that she worked as a salesgirl at Coin, in women's clothing.

  He decided he would prefer to speak to her in person and so, telling no one what he was doing, he left the Questura and headed back in the direction of the department store.

  Since the fire, almost ten years ago now, he had found it difficult to enter the store; the daughter of a friend of his had been one of the victims killed when a careless worker set fire to sheets of plastic that had, within minutes, turned the entire building into a smoke-filled hell. At the time, the fact that the girl had died from smoke inhalation and not from fire had seemed some consolation; years later, only the fact of her death remained.

  He took the escalator to the second floor and found himself enveloped in brown, Coin's choice that year for summer's colour: blouses, skirts, dresses, hats - all blended together in a swirl of earth tones. The saleswomen, unfortunately, had decided or been told to wear the same colours, so they blended in, almost invisible in this sea of umber, chocolate, mahogany, chestnut. Luckily, one of them moved towards him, distinguishing herself from the rack of dresses in front of which she had been standing. 'Could you tell me where I might find Teresa Bonamini?' Brunetti asked.

  She turned and pointed towards the back of the store. 'In furs,' she said and moved off towards a woman in a suede jacket who raised a hand in her direction.

  Brunetti followed her gesture and found himself moving between racks of fur coats and jackets, a hecatomb, of fauna, the sale of which was apparently not affected by the season. There was longer furred fox, glossy mink, and one particularly dense pelt he couldn't identify. Some years ago, a wave of social consciousness had swept the Italian fashion industry, and for a season women had been enjoined to buy 'la peilliccia ecologica', wildly-patterned and coloured furs that made no attempt to disguise the fact that they were fake. But no matter how inventive the design or high the price, they could never be made to cost as much as real furs, and so the call of vanity was not sufficiently satisfied. They were symbols of principle, not of status, and they quickly passed out of fashion and were given to cleaning ladies or sent to refugees in Bosnia. Worse, they had turned into an ecological nightmare, vast swatches of bio-undegradable plastic. So real fur had returned to the racks.

  'Si, Signore’ the salesgirl who approached Brunetti asked, pulling him back from reflections upon the vanity of human wishes. She was blonde, blue-eyed, and almost as tall as he.

  'Signorina Bonamini?'

  'Yes,' she answered, giving Brunetti a careful look instead of a smile.

  'I'd like to talk to you about Maurizio Lorenzoni, Signorina’ he explained.

  The transformation of her face was immediate. From passive curiosity, it changed instantly to irritation, even alarm. 'All of that's settled. You can ask my lawyer.'

  Brunetti stepped back from her and smiled politely. 'I'm sorry, Signorina, I should have introduced myself.' He took his wallet from his pocket and held it up so that she could see his photo. ‘I’m Commissario Guido Brunetti, and I'd like to talk to you about Maurizio. There's no need of a lawyer. I merely want to ask you a few questions about him.'

  'What sort of questions?' she asked, the alarm still in her voice.

  'About what sort of man he is, what sort of character he has.'

  'Why do you want to know?'

  'As you probably know, his cousin's body has been found, and we've reopened the investigation of his kidnapping. So we have to start all over again, gathering information about the family.'

  'It's not about my hand?' she asked.

  'No, Signorina. I know about the incident, but I'm not here to talk about it'

  'I never made una denuncia, you know. It was an accident.'

  'But your hand was broken, wasn't it?' Brunetti asked, resisting the impulse to look down at her hands, which hung at her sides.

  Responding to his unspoken question, she raised her left hand and waved it in front of Brunetti, opening and closing the fingers. 'There's nothing at all wrong with it, is there?' she asked.

  'No, nothing at all, I'm glad to see,' Brunetti said and smiled again. 'But why did you speak of a lawyer?'

  'I signed a statement, after it happened, saying that I would never make a complaint, never bring charges against him. It really was an accident, you know,' she added warmly. 'I was getting out of the car on his side, and he closed the door before he knew I was there’

  'Then why did you need to sign that statement, if it was an accident?'

  She shrugged. ‘I don't know. His lawyer told him I should do it’

  'Was there any payment made?' Brunetti asked.

  Her ease of manner disappeared with the question. It's not illegal’ she insisted with the authority of one who has been told as much by more than one lawyer.

  'I know that, Signorina. I was merely curious. It has nothing at all to do with what I'd like to know about Maurizio.'

  A voice spoke behind him, addressed to Bonamini. 'Do you have the fox in size forty?'

  A smile flowed on to the girl's face. 'No, Signora. They've all been sold. But we have it in forty-four.'

  'No, no’ the woman said vaguely and drifted away, back towards the skirts and blouses.

  'Did you know his cousin?' Brunetti asked when Signorina Bonamini returned her attention to him.

  'Roberto?'

  'Yes.'

  'No, I never met him, but Maurizio did talk about him once in a while.'

  'What did he say about him? Can you remember?'

  She considered this for a while. 'No, nothing specific’

  'Then can you tell me if, by the way Maurizio spoke about him, they seemed to like one another?'

  "They were cousins,' she said, as if that were explanation enough.

  I know that, Signorina, but I wondered if you can remember Maurizio's ever saying something of Roberto or if you had some idea -1 don't think it matters how you formed it - about what Maurizio thought about him.' Brunetti tried another smile.

  Absently, she reached out and straightened a mink jacket. 'Well’ she said, paused a while, and then continued, 'if I had to say, then I'd say that Maurizio was impatient with him.'

  Brunetti knew better than to interrupt or question her.

  'There was one time when they sent him - Roberto, that is - to Paris. I think it was Paris. A big city, anyway, where the Lorenzonis had some sort of business deal going. I never really understood what happened, but Roberto opened a package or something like that or saw what was in a contract, and he talked about it to someone he shouldn't have told about it. Anyway, the deal was cancelled.'

  She glanced up at Brunetti and saw the look of disappointment on his face. ‘I know, I know it doesn't sound like very much, but Maurizio was really angry when it happened.' She weighed up the next comment but decided to say it. 'And he's got a terrible temper, Maurizio.'

  'Your hand?' Brunetti asked.

  'No’ she answered instantly. 'That really was an accident. He didn't mean to do it. Believe me, if he had, I would have been down at the Cardbinieri station the next morning, straight from the hospital.' She used the hand in question to adjust another fur. He just gets mad and shouts. I've never known him to do anything.- But you can't talk to him when he's like that; it's like he becomes someone else.'

  'And what is he like when he's being himself?'

  'Oh, he's serious. That's why I stopped going out with him: he was always calling up and saying he had to stay and
work, or we had to take other people to dinner, business people. And then this happened’ she said, waving the hand again, 'and so I told him I didn't want to see him any more’ How did he take that?'

  'I think he was relieved, especially after I told him I'd still sign the paper for his lawyers’

  'Have you heard from him at all since then?'

  'No. I see him on the street, the way you always do, and we say hello. No talk, nothing really, just "How are you?" and things like that’

  Brunetti pulled out his wallet again and took one of his cards from it. 'If you think of anything else, Signorina, would you call me at the Questura?'

  She took the card and slipped it into the pocket of the brown sweater she was wearing. 'Of course’ she said neutrally, and he doubted that his card would survive the afternoon.

  He extended his hand and shook hers, then made his way back through the racks of furs, towards the stairs. As he walked down towards the main exit, he wondered how many undeclared millions she had been given in return for her signature on that paper. But, as he so often reminded himself, tax evasion was not his business.

  19

  When he returned to work after lunch, Brunetti was told by the guard at the front door that Vice-Questore Patta wanted to see him. Fearing that this might be the repercussions of Signorina Elettra's behaviour towards Lieutenant Scarpa, he went up immediately.

  If Lieutenant Scarpa had said anything, however, it was in no way apparent, for Brunetti found Patta in an uncharacteristically friendly mood. Brunetti was instantly on his guard.

  Have you made any progress on the Lorenzoni murder, Brunetti?' Patta asked after Brunetti had taken his seat in front of the Vice-Questore's desk.