by Donna Leon
Brunetti smiled and shook his head at the same time.
‘She said she might be able to help me, but she had to think about it.’
‘If she chooses to remember,’ Brunetti said before he thought.
‘Don’t be unpleasant, Guido.’
‘Sorry. What did you say?’
‘That there’s nothing I’d enjoy more. Then she invited me to come for tea,’ Griffoni explained, smiling. ‘And she suggested that perhaps I could bring some pastries for her and Beata.’
Ah, how much his mother would have admired both of these women, he thought. ‘And when?’
‘Next Monday at three.’ Griffoni pushed herself away from the railing and started down the steps.
21
As they passed in front of the church, Griffoni said, ‘I wonder why she dislikes her so much.’
‘Could you untangle the pronouns?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Why Professoressa Crosera dislikes Signora Gasparini so much. She’s a helpless old woman who’s putting up a good fight against bad health and declining powers and not being in control of her life any more.’
‘Those are reasons to pity a person, Claudia, not to make you like them,’ Brunetti said, knowing even as he spoke how sententious he sounded.
‘Ever heard of jealousy?’ Griffoni asked, laughing. ‘Or possessiveness?’
‘Her husband spends his work week in Verona,’ Brunetti shot back, ‘and when he comes back to Venice, she hears that his aunt is nagging at him to come and visit her and to help her with this or that.’ Before she could interrupt, Brunetti went on, ‘It makes sense that his wife would think the old woman was repetitive, insistent, and forgetful.’
At this, Griffoni stopped walking, swung around, and all but blocked his way. ‘All right: she’s all these things. But she’s his aunt, for God’s sake.’ Her voice had grown louder with the last words, and Brunetti noticed a young woman turning to look at them.
Just as Brunetti was thinking how much she sounded like a southerner, with talk of the Sacred Family, Griffoni added, her voice suddenly low and almost icy, ‘Besides, you’ve seen the apartment: top floor facing the church of the Carmini, at least 250 square metres, view of the canal, view of the garden behind.’ To Brunetti, she sounded exactly like every shifty estate agent he’d ever known. ‘And who do you think is going to inherit that, Guido?’
Now she sounded like every shifty Venetian estate agent he’d ever known, seeing all human affairs through the lens of location and size, but he decided it would be unwise to remark on this. Instead, recalling the way the older woman had ignored Griffoni when they met, he asked, ‘You’ve certainly warmed towards her. Why the change?’
‘Because she’s tough,’ Griffoni said without hesitation. ‘And because, when I suggested you and I were a couple, but not married, she didn’t mind at all, the way many people her age still pretend to. She also liked it that I’m not Venetian.’
‘Why is that important?’
‘Because I don’t have preconceptions about the people here, and that means I’ll listen to her opinions without adding something about the way that person’s great-grandfather’s brother cheated the cousin of my great-grandfather out of twenty acres of land in Dolo in 1937.’
Brunetti laughed, defusing the situation, and said, ‘You’ve been paying attention to us, haven’t you?’
Returning his smile, Griffoni said, ‘You’re not so different from us, although Neapolitans usually go back more than five or six generations to find the reasons we give for having a strong opinion, even a positive one, about someone.’ After a moment’s thought, she added, ‘Strangely enough, most of what she said was in favour of people, about how she liked or trusted them.’
‘Did she mention anyone in particular?’
‘Oh, she had a list: her sainted uncle Marco, her doctor, her friend Anna Marcolin, two cheese-sellers at Rialto, and Signora Lamon, who lives on the floor below her.’ Griffoni paused in thought until the memory came … ‘the man with the moustache who sells fish in Campo Santa Margherita.’ In response to Brunetti’s glance, she explained. ‘She’s heard talk that he sometimes sells fish left over from the day before, but she said she could guarantee that this is not true. Her family’s bought fish from his family for sixty years.’
Laughing again, Brunetti said, ‘That’s certain proof she’s one of us.’
Griffoni responded, ‘It would make her one of us, too.’ Peace restored, they continued on their way.
‘The person at the top of the list is the pharmacist: Dottor Donato.’ In response to Brunetti’s blank look, she said, ‘He’s the owner of the Farmacia della Fontana, the one that issued the coupons. His name’s printed at the bottom of the coupon, along with the tax number, address, and phone number.’
‘What did she tell you?’
‘That he’s a descendant of a Doge who ruled in the seventeenth century for thirty-five days, and she’s proud to be his client.’ Griffoni let out a puff of disbelief. ‘I know we’re title-crazy in Naples, but it’s nothing like the way people here carry on.’
‘Maybe it’s the little hats the Doges wore,’ Brunetti suggested, straight-faced.
She stopped, looked at him, and laughed. ‘This is the first time I’ve had a Venetian not go all buggy-eyed and fall on the ground in fits at the mention of the Doges. Are you sure you’re really Venetian?’
Switching to the most impenetrable pronunciation and using the dialect he remembered from his grandparents, Brunetti said, ‘Noialtri semo zente che no se lassemo strucar le segole in te i oci.’
‘What’s that mean?’ she asked.
‘Roughly, it means that we don’t let ourselves be fooled by anyone.’
He watched as she tried to repeat it in her memory and translate it into Italian. And fail. ‘It could mean anything, as far as I’m concerned,’ she said.
He was pleased she hadn’t understood: some parts of the city still hadn’t been given away. His own children spoke Italian more easily than Veneziano, probably because he and Paola spoke Italian with them. That hadn’t stopped them, however, from learning Veneziano from their classmates.
Brunetti pulled his attention back to Signora Gasparini and asked, ‘Did she say anything else about the pharmacist?’
‘She’s been going to him for a few years, so he’s probably diagnosed her as many times as her doctor has.’
With no warning, the clouds parted and Campo Santa Margherita was flooded with sun; the temperature soared. ‘Let’s sit for a minute,’ Griffoni said, moving towards one of the long benches in the campo.
Griffoni sat, folded her arms, and stretched out her legs. Brunetti joined her, half turned towards her; two friends, stopping for a chat. ‘I have two aunts,’ she said, looking at her feet and not at Brunetti. ‘With Alzheimer’s: well, the beginnings of. And they both jump from subject to subject with no preparation and no logic. First it’s fish and then it’s the rail system, or their children and then the chewing gum on the streets. If I want to talk to them about something, I have to keep herding them back to – for example – the chewing gum. They concentrate for half a minute, and we can talk, but then they’re on to Mexico or Lourdes, so I have to ask them again about the chewing gum, and then they can talk about it some more. But then they start asking if I’ve decided what I want to study in university or where I bought my sweater. By the time I mention chewing gum again, they’ve forgotten we’d talked about it.’
‘And?’ Brunetti inquired.
‘Signora Gasparini is hardly as far gone as my aunts, but she used their technique, and it might have been to avoid talking about him. I asked about Dottor Donato, and she asked where I got my shoes. I told her I got them at San Leonardo, right opposite the pharmacy, and that made her tell me that the ex-cinema Italia in San Leonardo is now a supermarket, and we had to talk about that for a while. That’s how it went, like billiards, things always going off at crazy angles and sometimes returning to where we started, but only if I fo
und a way to drag her back. She spoke of him with admiration and gratitude, but there was something else in her tone.’ Griffoni pulled her legs in and crossed her knees, then started to wave her right foot up and down in the air.
‘I got the impression,’ she said, her foot continuing to move, ‘that she was suspicious of him but afraid to confess it, even to herself.’ She unfolded her arms and placed her palms to either side of her on the bench. After a moment, she pushed herself to her feet and said, ‘That’s enough for today. I’ll go back now. We can talk later.’ She turned in the direction of Campo San Barnaba and the closest vaporetto stop and was quickly absorbed by the crowd of people – once unusual at this time of year – moving in that direction.
Instead of starting for home, Brunetti went into a bar and ordered a coffee. While he waited for it to come, he called Signorina Elettra, gave her Dottor Donato’s name, and asked her to see what she could find out about him. She asked if there was anything else he’d like, and hung up when he said that was all.
He went to the cash register and asked to pay for his coffee and was surprised when he was told it was one Euro, twenty. He paid without questioning the price, but out in the calle, he found himself wondering if he had been cheated or if the price had been allowed to rise since yesterday, when he’d paid one Euro, ten.
Are we really that venal? Brunetti asked himself and started walking in the direction of Campo San Barnaba.
His family, it seemed to him in retrospect, had combined poverty with generosity, but perhaps memory was adorning his parents’ behaviour. He remembered a succession of men described as friends of his father who had often eaten with them and recalled that his own clothing, after he’d worn it for two or three years, often disappeared from his wardrobe after a visit from a cousin of his mother who lived in Castello with her six children and perpetually unemployed husband. Brunetti’s had been a family that had nothing but could always find something amidst that nothing to give to someone who had more nothing.
‘And who’s more Venetian than we are?’ he asked the air in a soft voice, much to the surprise of a woman who was walking past him in the campo.
He turned right after the Accademia and then left and into the pharmacy on the first corner. Standing behind the counter was his former classmate and first fidanzata, Beatrice Rossi. She saw him come in and smiled at the sight of him, as she had each time they’d met over the years. ‘Well, look who’s here,’ she exclaimed, apparently addressing the same air he had spoken to in the campo.
She came from behind the counter and they embraced, two happily married people who had thought, years ago, decades ago, that this might be their common destiny. He looked at her face and, behind the wrinkles at the sides of her mouth and eyes, saw the sweet-smelling girl who had come, the first day of liceo, to sit next to him in history class.
‘Still chasing bad guys?’ It was, by now, her formulaic question.
‘Still selling drugs?’ was his.
‘Do you have time for a coffee?’ Brunetti asked, knowing that, after so many years in the pharmacy, she pretty much came and went as she pleased.
‘No, I can’t, Guido. Lucilla’s sick, so the only one here with me is the girl, and she can’t make up prescriptions.’ She looked around. ‘No one’s here: we can talk.’ Over the years, Beatrice had occasionally provided information to Brunetti about the people in her area, sometimes those she knew as clients. She never discussed their medical information nor anything they might have told her in confidence, but once or twice she had repeated gossip when Brunetti assured her that the information was necessary to him.
‘Who is it this time?’ she asked with easy familiarity. When she saw his surprise at her directness, she smiled and said, ‘I see that hunter’s gleam in your eyes, Guido.’
Rather than protest, Brunetti smiled in return and said, ‘Dottor Donato, your colleague.’
Beatrice’s mouth opened involuntarily ‘Oh, my,’ she said. ‘Why ever would you bother with someone like him?’
‘His name came up in another matter, and I’d like to know more about him before we bother to spend any more time taking a careful look.’ This might not have been the whole truth, but it was true.
‘How did it come up?’ she asked.
‘Oh, someone mentioned him,’ Brunetti answered.
Beatrice burst into laughter. ‘Next thing, you’ll be refusing to tell me Paola’s name,’ she said and laughed again, this time at her own remark.
Brunetti pressed his lips together and raised his eyebrows in something close to embarrassment. ‘All right, all right, Beatrice. The truth is I’d rather not say. I just want to have a feel of the man.’
‘Give me a hint,’ she said. At first, he thought she was joking, but then he realized what good sense she had: she had no business talking about Donato’s sexual preferences if his children were involved in stealing cars on the mainland, nor should she reveal that he beat his wife, nor that his wife beat him.
It took Brunetti some time to find a way to explain what he wanted to know. ‘Would he bend rules to increase his profits?’
A woman about Brunetti’s age came in and walked to the counter; Beatrice retreated behind it and asked if she could help her. The woman turned to look at Brunetti, but he directed his attention to the contents of a bottle of shampoo and was amazed by the number of substances inside and curious about why so many were needed.
The women conversed in low voices and Beatrice went into the back of the pharmacy to emerge after a few minutes with four boxes of medicine. She took the boxes, peeled off stamps from the backs, and pasted them on to the prescriptions the woman gave her. Then she ran the prescriptions over the sensor plate next to the cash register, put the boxes in a plastic bag, and accepted a twenty-Euro note in payment. She rang up the sale and returned the woman’s change, added the receipt, thanked her, and wished her a pleasant evening.
When the woman was gone, Beatrice came over to stand opposite Brunetti. ‘Dottor Donato is one of the most respected pharmacists in the city, Guido. He was once the President of the Ordine dei Farmacisti.’
Brunetti waited. When she said no more, he insisted, ‘Now tell me what you don’t want to tell me.’ Silence. ‘Please, Beatrice. It might be important.’ Still not a lie, but Brunetti nevertheless felt uncomfortable saying it.
‘Well,’ she began and turned to straighten a display of cough drops. ‘There are some people who’d probably say yes to your question. It doesn’t matter who they are.’
She seemed to have concluded, but then she smiled at Brunetti and leaned close, as if about to tell a secret, and said, ‘There’s no need to bend the rules: we earn more than enough as it is.’
‘May I write that out and ask you to sign it?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Good God, no,’ she exclaimed and raised her hands in mock horror. ‘They’d expel me from the Order of Pharmacists if that got back to them.’
‘It’s good to hear one of you, at least, admit it,’ Brunetti said with sudden seriousness.
‘We all have too much, Guido; not just pharmacists. All of us. Too much money and too much stuff, and never happy with what we have.’
Brunetti looked across at this new person, wondering if he had heard her correctly. ‘Do you really mean that, Beatrice?’
‘With all my heart,’ she said seriously. ‘I’d give it all away if I could.’ She smiled suddenly, ‘Well, half of it. Or part of it.’ Her smile grew. ‘I’m such a hypocrite: don’t pay any attention to me.’
‘But you meant it, didn’t you?’ Brunetti asked. ‘At least while you were saying it?’
‘Probably,’ she said hesitantly, and then more forcefully, ‘Yes. The only trouble is that I can’t keep meaning it. It comes over me once in a while when I see all the things we have, Rolando and I, and all the things the kids have. But then I forget about it.’ She shook her head. ‘Pretend I didn’t say that, all right?’
Brunetti shook his head. ‘No, I want to remember it. It’
s one of the best things I’ve ever heard you say.’
He leaned forward and kissed her on both cheeks and left the pharmacy, not looking back from the door because he didn’t want to meet her glance.
22
As Brunetti walked towards home, he thought about what Beatrice had said: ‘Probably.’ How interpret that? She’d heard talk, but that was hardly material on which to build a case against a man. ‘Some people’ believed Dottor Donato would bend the rules to increase his profit. The legal profession called this ‘hearsay evidence’, a kind of linguistic alchemy that tried to transmute gossip into something more credible.
He recalled that Beatrice had spent two years at university studying to be a notary and then had surprised her friends and family – her father was a notary – by abandoning it and switching to farmacia. At the time, the best explanation she could give was that she wanted to do something that would help people, an answer which failed to satisfy her family.
Thinking of notaries, he recalled the farcical scene when he and Paola had bought their apartment, more than twenty years before. The notary, just at the moment when the bank cheque was to change hands, remembered something he had to do in some other room and left the buyer to pass it to the sellers. No sooner had the door closed behind him than Brunetti opened his briefcase and pulled from it packs of lire – ah, who thought of the lira now, dear little lira? He’d passed the stacks to the sellers, a young couple who had decided to move to Vicenza, and they’d started to count their way through the stacks of notes.
At one point, the notary had knocked on the door and called from outside to ask if they were finished. They’d all joined in, calling out, ‘No’, the seller even shouting, ‘Don’t come in’, an order the notary obeyed.
When the hundred million lire was all counted and resting in a different briefcase, Brunetti pulled out a bank cheque for a hundred million lire less than the real price of the apartment, put it on the table, and called to summon the notary back to his own office.