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‘But how did you know about the party?’ Paola asked, astonished.
‘I read about it in the paper.’
‘My parents, and you read about it in the paper?’ This seemed to offend Paola’s atavistic concept of the family.
‘Yes; but will you ask them?’
‘Guido, I usually have to threaten you just to get you to go and have Christmas dinner with them, and now you suddenly want to go to one of their parties. Why?’
‘Because I want to talk to the sort of people who go to that sort of thing.’
Paola, who had been reading and grading student papers when he came in, carefully set her pen down and graced him with the look she usually reserved for brutal infelicities of language. Though they were not infrequent in the papers that rested under her pen, she was not accustomed to hearing them from her husband. She looked at him a long time, formulating one of the replies he often relished as much as he dreaded. ‘I doubt that they could refuse, given the elegance of your request,’ she said, then picked up the pen and bent back over the papers.
It was late, and he knew that she was tired, so he busied himself at the counter, making coffee. ‘You know you won’t sleep if you drink coffee this late,’ she said, recognizing what he was doing from the sounds he made.
He passed her on the way to the stove, ruffled her hair, and said, ‘I’ll think of something to occupy myself.’
She grunted, struck a line through a phrase, and asked, ‘Why do you want to meet them?’
‘To find out as much as I can about Wellauer. I’ve been reading about what a genius he was, about his career, about his wives, but I don’t have any real idea of what sort of man he was.’
‘And you think the sort of people,’ she said with heavy emphasis, ‘who go to my parents’ parties would know about him?’
‘I want to know about his private life, and those are the people who would know the sort of thing I want to know.’
‘That’s the sort of thing you can read about in STOP.’ It never failed to amaze him that a person who taught English literature at the university could be so intimate with the gutter press.
‘Paola,’ he said. ‘I want to find out things that are true about him. STOP’s the sort of place where you read about Mother Teresa’s abortion.’
She grunted and turned a page, leaving a trail of angry blue marks behind her.
He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a liter of milk, splashed some into a pan, and set it on the flame to heat. From long experience, he knew that she would refuse to drink a cup of coffee, no matter how much milk he added to it, insisting that it would keep her awake. But once he had his own, she would sip at it, end up drinking most of it, then sleep like a rock. From the cabinet he pulled down a bag of sweet biscuits they bought for the children and peered into it to see how many were left.
When the coffee was finished boiling up into the top of the double pot, he poured it into a mug, added the steaming milk, spooned in less sugar than he liked, and went to sit across from Paola. Absently, still intent on the paper in front of her, she reached out and took a sip of coffee even before he had a chance to do so. When she put it back on the table, he wrapped his fingers around it but didn’t pick it up. She turned a page, reached out for the mug, and looked up at him when he refused to release it.
‘Eh?’ she asked.
‘Not until you agree to call your mother.’
She tried to push his hand away. When he refused to move it, she wrote a rude word on it with her pen. ‘You’ll have to wear a suit.’
‘I always wear a suit when I go to see your parents.’
‘Well, you never look like you’re happy to be wearing a suit.’
All right,’ he said, smiling. ‘I promise to wear a suit and to look happy that I’m wearing it. So will you call your mother?’
‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘But I meant it about the suit.’
‘Yes, my treasure,’ he fawned. He let go of the cup and pushed it toward her. When she had taken another sip, he extracted a biscuit from the bag and dipped it into the coffee.
‘You are disgusting,’ she said, then smiled.
‘Simple peasant,’ he agreed, shoving the biscuit into his mouth.
Paola never talked much about what it had been like to be raised in the palazzo, with an English nanny and a flock of servants, but if he knew anything about all those years, he knew that she had never been permitted to dunk. He saw it as a great lapse in her upbringing and insisted that their children be allowed to do it. She had agreed, but with great reluctance. Neither child, he never failed to point out to her, showed grave signs of moral or physical decline as a result.
From the way she scribbled a hasty comment across the bottom of a page, he knew she was about to come to the end of her patience for that night.
‘I’m so tired of their blunt minds, Guido,’ she said, capping the pen and tossing it down on the table. ‘I’d almost rather deal with murderers. At least they can be punished.’
The coffee was finished, or he would have pushed it toward her. Instead he got up and took a bottle of grappa from the cabinet. It was the only comfort he could think of at the moment.
‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘First coffee, and now grappa. We’ll never get to sleep.’
‘Shall we try keeping each other awake?’ he asked. She glowed.
* * * *
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The following morning, he arrived at the Questura at eight, carrying with him the day’s newspapers, which he read through quickly. There was little new information: most of it had been said the day before. The summaries of Wellauer’s career were longer, the cries that the killer be brought to justice more strident, but there was nothing that Brunetti didn’t already know.
The lab report was on his desk. The only fingerprints on the cup, in which traces of potassium cyanide were found, were Wellauer’s. In the dressing room, there were scores of other prints, far too many to be checked. He decided against having prints taken. Since the only ones on the cup were Wellauer’s, there seemed little sense in identifying all those found in the room.
Along with the fingerprint report was a list of articles found in the dressing room. He remembered having seen most of them: the score of Traviata, each page crowded with notations in the angular Gothic script of the conductor; a comb, a wallet, change; the clothes he had been wearing and those in the closet; a handkerchief and a package of mints. There had also been a Rolex Oyster, a pen, and a small address book.
The officers who had gone to take a look at the conductor’s home—one could hardly call it a search—had written a report, but since they had no idea of what they were supposed to be looking for, Brunetti had little hope that their report would reveal anything of interest or importance. Nevertheless, he picked it up and read through it carefully.
The Maestro had had a remarkably complete wardrobe for a man who spent only a few weeks in the city each year. He marveled at the precision of the notes made about the clothing: ‘Black double-vent cashmere jacket (Duca D’Aosta); cobalt and muted-umber sweater, size 52 (Missoni).’ For a moment, he wondered if he had lost his bearings and found himself in the Valentino boutique rather than in police headquarters. He flipped to the end and found, as he had feared, the signatures of AIvise and Riverre, the two officers who had written, a year ago, about a body that had been pulled out of the sea at the Lido: ‘Appears to have died of suffocation.’
He turned back to the report. The signora, it appeared, did not share her late husband’s interest in clothing. Nor, from what he read, did it seem that Alvise and Riverre thought highly of her taste. ‘Varese boots, only one pair. Black woolen coat, no label.’ They had, however, apparently been impressed by the library, which they described as ‘extensive, in three languages and what appears to be Hungarian.’
He turned another page. There were two guest rooms in the apartment, each with a separate bath. Fresh towels, empty closets, Christian Dior soap.
There was no evidence of Signora Wellauer’s daughter; nothing in the report suggested the presence in the house of the third member of the family. Neither of the two extra rooms held a teenager’s clothes or books or possessions of any kind. Knowing how he was forever finding proof of his own daughter’s existence under foot, Brunetti found this strange. Her mother had explained that she was going to school in Munich. But it was a remarkable child who managed to take all of her clutter along with her.
There was a description of the Belgian maid’s room, which the two officers appeared to have found too simply furnished, and of the maid, whom they had found subdued but helpful. The last room described was the Maestro’s office, where they had found ‘documents.’ Some, it seems, had been brought back and looked over by the German translator, who explained, in a page added to the report, that the bulk of them pertained to business and contracts. A datebook had been inspected and judged unimportant.
Brunetti decided to seek out the two authors of this document and thus spare himself the irritation of having to wait for them to respond to his request that they come up to his office. Since it was almost nine, he knew that he would find them down the street at the bar on the other side of the Ponte dei Greci. It was not the precise hour but the fact that it was before noon that made this conclusion inescapable.
Though Brunetti dreaded the assignment of the two men to any case he was working on, he couldn’t help liking them. Alvise was a squat man in his late forties, almost a caricature of the dark-skinned Sicilian, save that he came from Tarvisio, on the border with Austria. He was accepted as the resident expert on popular music, this because he had once, fifteen years ago, actually had a program autographed by Mina, the mythic queen of Italian popular singing. Over the years, this event had swelled and expanded—as had Mina—by repeated retelling, until Alvise now suggested, eyes bright with the glitter of satisfied desire, that far more had gone on between them. The retelling seemed not at all affected by the fact that the singer was a head taller than Alvise and was now almost twice his girth.
Riverre, his partner, was a red-haired Palermitano, whose only interests in life appeared to be soccer and women, in that order. The high point in his life to date was having survived the riot in the Brussels soccer stadium. He augmented his account of what he had done there, before the Belgian police arrived, with tales of his triumphs with women, usually foreigners, who, he claimed, fell like wheat before the sickle of his charms.
Brunetti found them, as he had expected, standing at the counter in the bar. Riverre was reading the sports newspaper, and Alvise was talking with Arianna, the woman who owned the bar. Neither noticed Brunetti’s arrival until he came up to the bar and ordered a coffee. At that, Alvise smiled in greeting and Riverre pulled his attention away from the paper long enough to greet his superior.
‘Two more coffees, Arianna,’ Alvise said, ‘all three on my bill.’
Brunetti recognized the maneuver, aimed at putting him in the other’s debt. By the time the three coffees arrived, Riverre stood with them, and the newspaper had somehow been transformed into a blue-covered case file, which now lay open on the counter.
Brunetti spooned in two sugars and swirled his spoon around. ‘Is it you two who went to the Maestro’s house?’
‘Yes, sir,’ brightly, from Alvise.
‘And what a house it is!’ chimed in Riverre.
‘I’ve just been looking at your report.’
‘Arianna, bring us some brioches.’
‘I read it with great interest.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Particularly your comments about his wardrobe. I take it you didn’t like those English suits.’
‘No, sir,’ replied Riverre, as usual not getting it. ‘I think they’re cut too loose in the leg.’
Alvise, reaching along the counter to open the file, accidentally nudged his partner in the arm, perhaps a bit harder than was necessary. ‘Anything else, sir?’ he asked.
‘Yes. While you were there, did you notice any sign of the signora’s daughter?’
‘Is there a daughter, sir?’ This, predictably, from Riverre.
‘That’s why I’m asking you. Was there any sign of a child? Books? Clothes?’
Both showed signs of deep thought. Riverre stared off into space, which he seemed to find closer than most people did, and Alvise looked down at the floor, hands thrust into his uniform pockets. The requisite minute passed before they both answered, ‘No, sir,’ at the same time, almost as if they had practiced it.
‘Nothing at all?’
Again their separate displays, then the simultaneous response: ‘No, sir.’
‘Did you speak to the maid, the Belgian?’
Riverre rolled his eyes at the memory of the maid, suggesting that any time spent with such a stick of a woman was time wasted, even if she was a foreigner. Alvise contented himself with ‘Yes, sir.’
‘And did she tell you anything that might be important?’
Riverre drew in a breath, preparing himself to answer, but before he could begin, his partner said, ‘Nothing she actually said, sir. But I got the impression she didn’t like the signora.’
Riverre couldn’t let this pass and asked, with a lurid smile, ‘What’s not to like there?’ putting heavy emphasis on the last word.
Brunetti gave him a cool glance and asked his partner, ‘Why?’
‘It was nothing I could put my finger on,’ he began. Riverre snorted. So much for the effectiveness of his cool glance.
‘As I was saying, sir, it was nothing definite, but she seemed much more formal when the signora was there. Be hard for her to be more formal than she was with us, but it just seemed that way. She seemed to, I don’t know, get cooler when the signora was there, especially when she had to speak to her.’
‘And when was that?’
‘When we first went in. We asked her if it would be all right if we had a look around the apartment, at his things. From the way she answered us, I mean the signora, sir, it looked like she didn’t like the idea very much. But she told us to go ahead, and then she called the maid and told her to show us where his things were. It was then, when they were talking to each other, that the maid seemed, well, cold. Later, when she was talking to us, she seemed better. Didn’t warm up or anything—after all, she is Belgian—but she was better with us, more friendly, than she was with the other one.’
‘Did you speak to the signora again?’
‘Just before we were leaving, sir. We had the papers with us. She didn’t like it that we were taking them with us. It was just a look, but it’s the way she made us feel. We asked her if we could take the papers. We had to; it’s the regulation.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Anything else?’
‘Yes,’ chirped in Riverre.
‘What?’
‘She didn’t mind it when we looked through his clothing and closets. She sent the maid with us, didn’t even bother to come herself. But when we went into the other room, where the papers were, then she came along and told the maid to wait outside. She didn’t like us looking at that stuff, sir, papers and things.’
‘And what were they?’
‘They looked official, sir. It was all in German, and we brought it back here to be translated.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen the report. What happened to the papers, after they were translated?’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ answered Alvise. ‘Either they’re still down with the translator or they were sent back to her.’
‘Riverre, could you go and find out for me?’
‘Now, sir?’
‘Yes, now.’
‘Yes, sir.’ He sketched out something that resembled a salute and moved away from the bar with deliberate slowness.
‘And, Riverre,’ he called out after him. Riverre turned, hoping to be called back and spared the walk to the Questura and the two flights of stairs. ‘If the papers are there, have them sent up to my office.’
Brunetti pick
ed up one of the brioches that lay on a plate in front of them and took a bite. He signaled to Arianna to make him another coffee. ‘While you were there,’ he asked Alvise, ‘did you notice anything else?’
‘What kind of things, sir?’ As though they were meant to see only those things they were sent to look for.
‘Anything. You mentioned the tension between the two women. Did either of them seem to act strangely?’
Alvise thought for a moment, took a bite from one of the brioches, and answered, ‘No, sir.’ Seeing that Brunetti was disappointed with this answer, he added, ‘Only when we took the papers.’