Anonymous Venetian aka Dressed for Death

by Donna Leon

  ‘I extend my condolences, Signora Mascari,’ he said. ‘I understand how painful and shocking this must be for you.’ She still made no acknowledgement that he had spoken. ‘Is there someone you would like us to call and have come here to be with you?’

  She shook her head at this. ‘Tell me what happened,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps we could step into Sergeant Gallo’s office,’ Brunetti said, reaching down to open the door. He allowed the woman to pass in front of him. He glanced backwards at Gallo, who raised his eyebrows in interrogation; Brunetti nodded, and the sergeant came into the office with them. Brunetti held a chair for Signora Mascari, who sat and looked up at him.

  ‘Is there something we could get you, Signora? A glass of water? Tea?’

  ‘No. Nothing. Tell me what happened.’

  Sergeant Gallo took his place quietly behind his desk; Brunetti sat in a chair not far from Signora Mascari.

  ‘Your husband’s body was found in Mestre on Monday morning. If you’ve spoken to the people at the hospital, you know that the cause of death was a blow to the head.’

  She interrupted him. ‘There were blows to the face, as well.’ After she said this, she looked away and stared down at her hands.

  ‘Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm your husband, Signora? Can you think of anyone who has ever menaced him or with whom he had a serious argument?’

  She shook her head in immediate negation. ‘Leonardo had no enemies,’ she said.

  Brunetti’s experience suggested that a man did not get to be the director of a bank without making enemies, but he said nothing.

  ‘Did your husband ever mention difficulties at his work? Perhaps an employee he had to fire? Someone who was turned down for a loan and who held him responsible?’

  Again, she shook her head. ‘No, nothing like that. There’s never been any trouble.’

  ‘And your family, Signora? Has your husband ever had difficulties with anyone in your family?’

  ‘What is this?’ she demanded. ‘Why are you asking me these questions?’

  ‘Signora,’ Brunetti began, making what he hoped was a calming gesture with his hands. ‘The manner of your husband’s death, the very violence of it, suggests that whoever did it had reason to hate your husband a great deal, and so, before we can begin to look for that person, we have to have some idea of why he might have done what he did. So it is necessary that these questions be asked, painful as I know them to be.’

  ‘But I can’t tell you anything. Leonardo had no enemies.’ After repeating this, she looked across at Gallo, as if to ask him to verify what she said or to help her persuade Brunetti to believe her.

  ‘When your husband left the house last Sunday, he was on his way to Messina?’ Brunetti asked. She nodded. ‘Do you know the purpose of his trip, Signora?’

  ‘He told me it was for the bank and that he would be back on Friday. Yesterday.’

  ‘But he didn’t mention what the trip was about?’

  ‘No, he never did. He always said his work wasn’t very interesting, and he seldom discussed it with me.’

  ‘Did you hear anything from him after he left, Signora?’

  ‘No. He left for the airport on Sunday afternoon. He had a flight to Rome, where he had to change planes.’

  ‘Did your husband call you after that, Signora? Did he call you from Rome or from Messina?’

  ‘No, but he never did. Whenever he went on a business trip, he’d simply go wherever he was going and then come home, or he’d call me from his office in the bank if he went directly there when he got back to Venice.’

  ‘Was this usual, Signora?’

  ‘Was what usual?’

  ‘That he would go away on business and not get in touch with you?’

  ‘I just told you,’ she said, her voice going a bit sharp. ‘He travelled a bit for the bank, six or seven times a year. Sometimes he would send me a postcard or bring me a gift, but he never called.’

  ‘When did you begin to become alarmed, Signora?’

  ‘Last night. I thought he would go to the bank in the afternoon, when he got back, and then come home. But when he wasn’t home by seven, I called the bank, but it was closed. I tried to call two of the men he worked with, but they weren’t home.’ She paused here, took a deep breath, and then continued, ‘I told myself I’d got the day wrong or the time, but by this morning, I couldn’t fool myself any more, so I called one of the men who works at the bank, and he called a colleague in Messina, and then he called me back.’ She stopped talking here.

  ‘What did he tell you, Signora?’ Brunetti asked in a low voice.

  She put one knuckle to her mouth, hoping, perhaps, to keep the words from coming out, but she had seen the body in the morgue, and so there was no use in that. ‘He told me that Leonardo had never been to Messina. And so I called the police. Called you. They told me… when I gave them a description of Leonardo… they told me that I should come out here. So I did.’ Her voice had grown increasingly ragged as she explained all of this, and when she finished, her hands were clutched desperately together in her lap.

  ‘Signora, are you sure there’s no one you’d like to call or have us call to come here to be with you? Perhaps you shouldn’t be alone at this time,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘No. No, there’s no one I want to see.’ Abruptly, she stood. ‘I don’t have to stay here, do I? Am I free to leave?’

  ‘Of course, Signora. You’ve been more than kind to answer these questions.’

  She ignored this.

  Brunetti made a small gesture to Gallo as he stood and followed Signora Mascari to the door. ‘We’ll have a car take you back to Venice, Signora.’

  ‘I don’t want anyone to see me arrive in a police car,’ she said.

  ‘It will be an unmarked car, Signora, and the driver won’t be in uniform.’

  She made no acknowledgement to this, and the fact that she didn’t object probably meant that she would accept the ride to Piazzale Roma.

  Brunetti opened the door and accompanied her to the stairs at the end of the corridor. He noticed that her right hand had a death grip on her purse, and the left was jammed into the pocket of her jacket.

  Downstairs, Brunetti went out on to the steps of the Questura with her, out into the heat that he had forgotten. A dark blue sedan waited at the foot of the steps, motor running. Brunetti bent down and opened the door for her, held her arm as she stepped into the car. Once seated, she turned away from him and looked out of the window on the other side, though all she saw was traffic and the bleak façade of office buildings. Brunetti closed the door softly and told the driver to take Signora Mascari back to Piazzale Roma.

  When the car disappeared into the flow of traffic, Brunetti went back to Gallo’s office. As he went in, he asked the sergeant, ‘Well, what did you think?’

  ‘I don’t believe in people who have no enemies.’

  ‘Especially middle-aged bank managers,’ Brunetti added.

  ‘And so?’ Gallo asked.

  ‘I’ll go back to Venice and see if there’s anything I can find out there, from my people. Now that we’ve got a name, we at least have a place to begin to look.’

  ‘For what?’ Gallo asked.

  Brunetti’s answer was immediate. ‘First, we’ve got to do what we should have been doing from the beginning, find out where the clothing and the shoes he was wearing came from.’

  Gallo took this as a reproach and answered just as quickly, ‘Nothing on the dress yet, but we’ve got the name of the manufacturer of the shoes and should have a list by this afternoon of the stores that sold them.’

  Brunetti had not intended his remark as a criticism of the Mestre branch, but he let it stand. It could do no harm to spur Gallo and his men into finding out where Mascari’s clothing had come from, for surely those shoes and that dress were not the sort of thing a middle-aged banker wore to the office.

  Chapter Thirteen

  If Brunetti thought he was going to fi
nd people working on a Saturday morning in August, the staff of the Questura thought otherwise: there were guards at the door, even a cleaning woman on the stairs, but the offices were empty, and he knew there was no hope of getting anything done until Monday morning. For a moment, he thought of getting on a train to Bolzano, but he knew it would be after dinner before he got there, just as he knew he would spend all the next day eager to be back in the city.

  He let himself into his office and opened the windows, though he was aware there was no good to be done by that. The room became more humid, perhaps even minimally hotter. No new papers lay on his desk, no report from Signorina Elettra.

  He reached down into his bottom drawer and pulled out the telephone book. He flipped it open and turned to the L’s, but there was no listing for Lega della Moralità, though that didn’t surprise him. Under the S’s, he found Santomauro, Giancarlo, aw. and an address in S. Marco. The late Leonardo Mascari, he learned by using the same system, lived in Castello. This surprised him: Castello was the least prestigious sestiere of the city, a zone primarily inhabited by solid working-class families, an area where children could still grow up speaking nothing but dialect and remain entirely ignorant of Italian until they began elementary school. Perhaps it was the Mascari family home. Or perhaps he had made a lucky deal on an apartment or house. Apartments in Venice were so hard to find, and those found so outrageously priced, either to buy or to rent, that even Castello was becoming fashionable. Spending enough money on restoration could perhaps provide respectability, if not for the entire quartiere, then at least for the individual address.

  He checked the listings in the yellow pages for banks, and found that the Bank of Verona was listed in Campo San Bartolomeo, the narrow campo at the foot of the Rialto where many banks had their offices; this surprised him, for he could not remember ever having seen it. More out of curiosity than anything else, he dialled the number. The phone was picked up on the third ring, and a man’s voice said, ‘Si?’ as though he were expecting a call.

  ‘Is this the Bank of Verona?’ Brunetti asked.

  There was a moment’s pause, and then the man said, ‘I’m sorry, you’ve reached a wrong number.’

  ‘Sorry to trouble you,’ Brunetti said.

  The other man replaced the phone without saying anything else.

  The vagaries of SIP, the national telephone service, were such that having reached a wrong number would strike no one as in any way strange, but Brunetti was certain he had dialled the number correctly. He dialled the number again, but this time it rang unanswered twelve times before Brunetti replaced the receiver. He looked at the listing again and made a note of the address. Then he checked the phone book for Morelli’s pharmacy. The addresses were only a few numbers apart. He tossed the phone book back into the drawer and kicked it shut. He closed the windows, went downstairs, and left the Questura.

  Ten minutes later, he walked out from the sottoportico of Calle della Bissa and into Campo San Bartolomeo. His eyes went up to the bronze statue of Goldoni, perhaps not his favourite playwright, but certainly the one who could make him laugh the hardest, especially when the plays were presented in their original Veneziano dialect, as they always were here, in the city that swarmed to his plays and loved him enough to put up this statue. Goldoni was in full stride, which made this campo the perfect place for him to be, for here, everyone rushed, always on their way somewhere: across the Rialto Bridge to go to the vegetable market; from Rialto to either the San Marco or the Cannaregio district. If people lived anywhere near the heart of the city, its geography would pull them through San Bartolomeo at least once a day.

  When Brunetti got there, foot traffic was at its height as people rushed to the market before it closed, or they hurried home from work, the week finally over. Casually, he walked along the east side of the campo, looking at the numbers painted above the doors. As he had expected, the number was painted above an entrance-way two doors to the right of the pharmacy. He stood for a moment in front of the panel of bells beside the door and studied the names. The Bank of Verona was listed, as were three other names with bells beside them, probably private apartments.

  Brunetti rang the first bell above the bank. There was no answer. The same happened with the second. He was about to ring the top bell when he heard a woman’s voice behind him, asking in purest Veneziano, ‘May I help you? Are you looking for someone who lives here?’

  He turned away from the bells and found himself looking down at a small old woman with an enormous shopping trolley leaning against her leg. Remembering the name on the first bell, he said, answering in the same dialect, ‘Yes, I’m here to see the Montinis. It’s time for them to renew their insurance policy, and I thought I’d stop by and see if they wanted to make any changes on the coverage.’

  ‘They’re not here,’ she said, looking into an enormous handbag, hunting for her keys. ‘Gone to the mountains. Same with the Gasparis, except they’re at Jesolo.’ Abandoning her hope of touching or seeing the keys, she took the bag and shook it, bent on locating them by sound. It worked, and she pulled out a bunch of keys as large as her hand.

  ‘That’s what all this is,’ she said, holding the keys up to Brunetti. ‘They’ve left me their keys, and I go in and water the plants, see the place doesn’t fall down.’ She looked up from the keys and at Brunetti’s face. Her eyes were a faded pale-blue, set in a round face covered with a tracery of fine lines. ‘Do you have children, Signore?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ he responded immediately.

  ‘Names and ages?’

  ‘Raffaele’s sixteen, and Chiara’s thirteen, Signora.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, as though he had passed some sort of test. ‘You’re a strong young man. Do you think you could carry that cart up to the third floor for me? If you don’t, then I’ll have to make at least three trips to get it all up there. My son and his family are coming to lunch tomorrow, so I’ve had to get a lot of things.’

  ‘I’d be very glad to help you, Signora,’ he said, bending down to pick up the cart, which must have weighed fifteen kilos. ‘Is it a big family?’

  ‘My son and his wife and their children. Two of them are bringing the great-grandchildren, so there’ll be, let’s see, there’ll be ten of us.’

  She opened the door and held it open while Brunetti slipped past her with the cart. She pushed on the timed light and started up the steps ahead of him. ‘You wouldn’t believe what they charged me for peaches. Middle of August, and they’re still charging three thousand lire a kilo. But I got them anyway; Marco likes to cut his up in red wine before lunch and then have it as dessert. And fish. I wanted to get a rombo, but it cost too much. Everyone likes a good boiled bosega, so that’s what I got, but he still wanted ten thousand lire a kilo. Three fish and it cost me almost forty thousand lire.’ She stopped at the first landing, just outside the door to the Bank of Verona, and looked down at Brunetti. ‘When I was a girl, we gave bosega to the cat, and here I am, paying ten thousand lire a kilo for it.’

  She turned and started up the next flight. ‘You’re carrying it by the handles, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Signora.’

  ‘Good, because I have a kilo of figs right on the top, and I wouldn’t want them to be crushed.’

  ‘No, they’re all right, Signora.’

  ‘I went to Casa del Parmigiana and got some prosciutto to go with the figs. I’ve known Giuliano since he was a boy. He’s got the best prosciutto in Venice, don’t you think?’

  ‘My wife always goes there, Signora.’

  ‘Costs l’ira di dio, but it’s worth it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, Signora.’

  They were at the top. She still carried the keys, so she didn’t have to hunt for them again. She opened the single lock on the door and pushed it open, letting Brunetti into a large apartment with four tall windows, closed and shuttered now, that opened on to the campo.

  She led the way through the living-room, a room familiar from Brunetti’s yo
uth: fat armchairs and a sofa with horsehair stuffing that scratched at whoever sat down; massive dark brown credenzas, their tops covered with silver candy bowls and silver-framed photos; the floor of poured Venetian pavement that glistened, even in the dim light. He could have been in his grandparents’ house.

  The kitchen was the same. The sink was stone, and an immense cylindrical water-heater sat in one corner. The kitchen table had a marble surface, and he could see her both rolling out pasta and ironing on the surface.

  ‘Just put it there, by the door,’ she said. ‘Would you like a glass of something?’

  ‘Water would be nice, Signora.’

  As he knew she would, she reached down a small silver salver from the top of the cabinet, placed a small round lace doily on it, then set a Murano wineglass on top of it. From the refrigerator, she took a bottle of mineral water and filled the glass.

  ‘Grazie infinite,’ he said before he drank the water. He set it carefully down on the centre of the doily and refused her offer of more. ‘Would you like me to help you unpack it all, Signora?’

  ‘No, I know where everything is and where it all goes. You’ve been very kind, young man. What’s your name?’

  ‘Brunetti, Guido.’

  ‘And you sell insurance?’

  ‘Yes, Signora.’

  ‘Well, thank you very much,’ she said, placing his glass in the sink and reaching into the trolley.

  Remembering what his real job was, he asked, ‘Signora, do you always let people into the apartment with you like this? Without knowing who they are?’

  ‘No, I’m not a fool. I don’t let just anyone in,’ she replied. ‘I always see if they have children. And, of course, they have to be Veneziano.’

  Of course. When he thought about it, her system was probably better than a lie detector or a security check. ‘Thank you for the water, Signora. I’ll let myself out.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, bent over her trolley, hunting for the figs.