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‘He called his lawyers’ office in Berlin, but apparently there was something wrong with the connection, and he never called back.’
‘Did any of the people you spoke to say anything about his personal life?’
The count’s glass stopped just short of his mouth with such a sudden motion that some of the pale liquid splashed onto the lapel of the jacket. He glared at Brunetti in astonishment, as though all the reservations he had harbored for almost two decades had suddenly been proved true. ‘What do you think I am, a spy?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Brunetti said, offering the count his handkerchief to dry his lapel. ‘It’s the job. I forget.’
‘Yes, I can see that,’ the count agreed, though his tone was void of any assent. ‘I’ll go and see if I can find Paola and her mother.’ He left, retaining the handkerchief, which Brunetti feared would be washed, starched, ironed, and sent back by special courier.
Brunetti pushed himself away from the bar and set out into the sea of people to begin his own search for Paola. He knew many of those in the room but, as it were, at second hand. Though he had never been introduced to most of them, he knew their scandals, their histories, their affairs, both legal and romantic. Part of this came from his being a policeman, but most of it came from living in what was really a provincial town where gossip was the real cult and where, had it not been at least a nominally Christian city, the reigning deity would surely have been Rumor.
During the more than five minutes it took him to find Paola, he exchanged greetings with a number of people and turned down repeated offers of a fresh drink. The countess was nowhere in sight; her husband had no doubt warned her of the risk of moral infection that stalked the room.
When Paola came up to him, she grabbed his arm and whispered into his ear. ‘I’ve found just what you want.’
‘A way to leave?’ he said, but only to himself. With her, he practiced some restraint. ‘What?’
‘The voice of gossip, the real thing. We were at university together.’
‘Who? Where?’ he asked, interested in his surroundings for the first time that night.
‘He’s over there, at the door to the balcony.’ She nudged him with her elbow and pointed with her chin to a man who stood across the room, at the central windows that overlooked the canal. The man looked to be about the same age as Paola, though he had clearly had a harder time getting there. From this distance, all Brunetti could distinguish was a short beard, mottled with gray, and a black jacket that seemed to be made of velvet.
‘Come on; I’ll introduce you,’ urged Paola, tugging at his arm and leading him across the room toward the man, who smiled when he recognized Paola coming toward him. His nose was flat, as though it had once been broken, and his eyes were sad, as though his heart had been. He looked like a stevedore who wrote poetry.
‘Ah, the lovely Paola,’ he said as she reached him. He switched his drink into his left hand, took Paola’s with his right, and bent to place a kiss in the air just above it. ‘And this,’ he said, turning to Brunetti, ‘must be the famous Guido, about whom all of us grew so tired of hearing more years ago than it is discreet of me to remember.’ He took Brunetti’s hand and shook it firmly, making no attempt to disguise the interest with which he studied him.
‘Stop it, Dami, and stop staring at Guido as if he were a painting.’
‘Force of habit, my treasure, peering and prying at everything I observe. Next I’ll no doubt peel back his jacket and try to see where he’s signed.’
None of this made any sense to Brunetti, whose confusion must have been obvious to both of the others, for the man hastened to explain. ‘As I can see, Paola will never introduce us, and she apparently has chosen to keep our past together a secret from you.’ Before Brunetti could respond to the suggestion here, he continued: ‘I am Demetriano Padovani, former classmate of your fair wife and currently a critic of things artistic’ He made a small bow.
Brunetti was, like most Italians, familiar with the name. This was the bright new art critic, the terror of both painters and museum directors. Paola and he had read his articles with shared delight, but he’d had no idea that they had gone to university together.
The other man grabbed a fresh drink from a passing waiter. ‘I must apologize to you, Guido—if I may take the liberty of calling you Guido at our first meeting and of giving you the tu, an evidence of growing social and linguistic promiscuity—and confess to having spent years hating you.’ Brunetti’s confusion at this remark obviously delighted him. ‘Back in those dark ages when we were students and all desperately in love with your Paola, we were convulsed by jealousy and, I admit, loathing for this Guido who seemed to have arrived from the stars to carry her heart away from us. First she wanted to know all about him, then it was “Will he take me for a coffee?” which as quickly developed into “Do you think he likes me?” until all of us, much as we loved the daffy girl, were quite ready to throttle her one dark night and toss her into a canal, just to have some freedom from the dark incubus that was Guido and so be left in peace to study for our exams.’ Delighting in Paola’s obvious discomfiture, he continued: ‘And then she married him. You, that is. Much to our delight, as nothing is such an effective remedy for the mad excesses of love,’ and here he paused to sip from his drink, before adding, ‘as is marriage.’ Content with having made Paola blush and Brunetti look around for another drink, he said, ‘It’s really a very good thing you did marry her, Guido, else not a one of us would have managed to pass our exams, so smitten were we with the girl.’
‘It was my only purpose in marrying her,’ Brunetti replied.
Padovani understood. ‘And for that charity, let me offer you a drink. What would you like?’
‘Scotch for us both,’ Paola answered, then added, ‘But come back quickly. I want to talk to you.’
Padovani bowed his head in false submission and headed off in pursuit of a waiter, moving like a very royal yacht of politeness as he made his way through the crowd. In a moment, he was back, holding three glasses in his hands.
‘Are you still writing for L’Unità?’ Paola asked as he handed her the drink.
At the sound of the name of the newspaper, Padovani pulled down his head in mock terror and shot conspiratorial glances around the room. He gave a very theatrical hiss and waved them close to him. In a whisper, he told them, ‘Don’t dare pronounce the name of that newspaper in this room, or your father will have the servants turn me out of the house.’ Though Padovani’s tone made it clear he was joking, Brunetti suspected that he was far closer to the truth than he realized.
The critic stood up to his full height, sipped at his drink, and changed to a voice that was almost declamatory. ‘Paola, my dear, could it be that you have abandoned the ideals of our youth and no longer read the proletarian voice of the Communist Party? Excuse me,’ he corrected himself, ‘the Democratic Party of the Left?’ Heads turned at the sound of the name, but he went on. ‘God above, don’t tell me you’ve accepted your age and begun to read Corriere or, even worse, La Repubblica, the voice of the grubbing middle class, disguised as the voice of the grubbing lower class?’
‘No, we read L’Osservatore Romano,,’ Brunetti said, naming the official organ of the Vatican, which still fulminated against divorce, abortion, and the pernicious myth of female equality.
‘How wise of you,’ Padovani said, voice unctuous with praise. ‘But since you read those glowing pages, you wouldn’t know that I am, however humbly, the voice of artistic judgment for the struggling masses.’ He dropped his voice and continued, aping perfectly the orotund voices of the RAI newscasters announcing the most recent fall of the government. ‘I am the representative of the clear-eyed laborer. In me you see the rude voiced and grubby-fingered critic who seeks the values of true proletarian art in the midst of modern chaos.’ He nodded in silent greeting to a passing figure and continued. ‘It seems a great pity that you are not familiar with my work. Perhaps I can send you copies of my most recent article
s. Pity I don’t carry them about with me, but I suppose even genius must display some humility, however spurious.’ They had all begun to enjoy this, so he continued. ‘My most recent favorite was a wonderful piece I wrote last month about an exhibition of contemporary Cuban art—you know, tractors and grinning pineapples.’ He made a moue of feigned distress until the exact words of his review came back to him. ‘I praised its—how did I put it?—”its wonderful symmetry of refined form and purposeful integrity.”‘ He leaned forward and whispered in Paola’s ear, but so loud that Brunetti had no trouble hearing. ‘I lifted that from one I wrote two years ago about Polish woodblocks, where I praised, if memory serves, “refined symmetry of purposeful form.”‘
‘And do you?’ Paola asked, glancing at his velvet jacket, ‘go to the office like that?’
‘How deliciously bitchy you have remained, Paola.’ He laughed, leaning forward to kiss her lightly on the cheek. ‘But to answer your question, my angel, no, I do not think it seemly to take this opulence to the halls of the working class. I don more suitable attire, namely a dreadful pair of trousers my maid’s husband would no longer wear and a jacket my nephew was going to give to the poor. Nor’— he held up a hand to prevent any interruption or question—’do I any longer drive there in the Maserati. I thought that would establish the wrong tone; besides, parking is such a problem in Rome. I solved the problem, for a while, by borrowing my maid’s Fiat to drive to the office. But it would be covered with parking tickets, and then I lost hours taking the commissario of police to lunch to see that they were taken care of. So now I simply take a cab from my house and have myself left off just around the corner from the office, where I deliver my weekly article, speak angrily about social injustice, and then go down the street to a lovely little pasticceria, where I treat myself to a shockingly rich pastry. Then I go home and have a long soak in a hot tub and read Proust.
‘“And so, on each side, is simple truth suppressed,”‘ he said, quoting from a Shakespeare sonnet, one of the texts to which he had devoted the seven years he spent getting a degree in English literature at Oxford. ‘But you must want something, some information, dearest Paola,’ he said with a directness that was out of character or, at least, out of the character he was playing. ‘First your lather calls me personally with an invitation to this party, and then you attach yourself to me like a button, and I doubt that you’d do that unless you wanted something from me. And as the divine Guido is here with you, all you can legitimately want is information. And since I know just what it is Guido does for a living, I can but surmise it has to do with the scandal that has rocked our fair city, struck dumb the music world, and, in the doing, removed from the face of the planet a nasty piece of work.’ The introduction of the British expression had the intended effect of surprising them both to gasps. He covered his mouth and gave a giggle of purest delight.
‘Oh, Dami, you knew all along. Why didn’t you just say so?’
Though Padovani’s voice was steady when he answered, Brunetti could see that his eyes were bright, perhaps with alcohol, perhaps with something else. It mattered little to him what it was, so long as the man would explain his last remark.
‘Come on,’ Paola encouraged. ‘You were the only person I could think of who would be bound to know about him.’
Padovani fixed her with a level glance. ‘And do you expect me to blacken the memory of a man who is not yet cold in his grave?’
From the sound of things, Brunetti thought that might well add to Padovani’s fun.
‘I’m surprised you waited that long,’ said Paola.
Padovani gave her remark the attention it deserved. ‘You’re right, Paola. I will tell you all—that is, if the delicious Guido will go and get us all three enormous drinks. If he doesn’t do it soon, I might begin to rail at the predictable tedium to which your parents have once again subjected me and, I note with wonder, half of what passes for the most famous people in the city.’ Then, turning to Brunetti, ‘Or better yet, Guido, if you could perhaps procure an entire bottle, we could, all three of us, steal away to one of the many ill-decorated rooms with which, alas, your parents’ home is filled.’ But he wasn’t finished and turned back to Paola. ‘And there, you using the blandishment of your beauty and your husband his unspeakable policeman’s methods, you could together pry the nasty, niggling, dirty truth out of me. After which, if you were so minded, you, or perhaps’—he broke off and gave Brunetti a long look—’both of you, could have your way with me.’ So that’s the way things were, Brunetti suddenly realized, surprised that he had so successfully missed all the clues.
Paola shot Brunetti an entirely unnecessary warning glance. He liked the man’s excess. He had no doubt that the invitation, wildly put as it had been, was entirely sincere, but that hardly seemed something to become angry about. He went off, as directed, to see about finding a bottle of Scotch.
It was a comment on either the count’s hospitality or the laxity of the staff that he was given a bottle of Glenfiddich for the mere asking. When he got back to them, he found them arm in arm, whispering like conspirators. Padovani hushed Paola to silence and explained to Brunetti, ‘I was just asking her whether, if I were to commit a really heinous crime, perhaps tell her mother what I think of the drapes, you’d take me down to your office to beat me until I confessed.’
‘How do you think I got this?’ Brunetti asked, and held up the bottle.
Padovani and Paola both laughed. ‘Lead us, Paola,’ the writer commanded, ‘to a place where we can have our way with this, if not’— with a cow-eyed glance at Brunetti—’with one another.’
Ever practical, Paola said flatly, ‘We can use the sewing room,’ and led them out of the main salon and through a set of massive double doors. Then, like Ariadne, she led them unerringly down one corridor, turned to the left, down another, through the library, and into a smaller room, in which a number of delicate brocade-covered chairs stood in a semicircle around an enormous television.
‘Sewing room?’ asked Padovani.
‘Before “Dynasty”,’ explained Paola.
Padovani threw himself down into the most substantial chair in the room, swept his patent-leather shoes up onto the intaglio table, and said, ‘Right, darlings, shoot,’ no doubt lapsing into English by the mere force of the presence of the television. When neither of them asked a question, he prompted them. ‘What is it you want to know about the late and not by anyone I can think of lamented Maestro?’
‘Who would want to see him dead?’ Brunetti asked.
‘You are direct, aren’t you? No wonder Paola capitulated with such alarming speed. But to answer your question, you’d need a phone book to hold the list of names.’ He stopped speaking for a while and held out his glass for some whisky. Brunetti poured him a generous glassful, gave himself some, as well, and poured a smaller amount into Paola’s glass. ‘Do you want me to give it to you chronologically, or perhaps by nationality, or a breakdown according to voice type or sexual preference?’ He rested his glass on the arm of his chair and continued slowly. ‘He goes back in time, Wellauer does, and the reasons people hated him go back along with him. You’ve probably heard the rumors about his having been a Nazi during the war. It was impossible for him to stop them, so like the good German he was, he simply ignored them. And no one seemed to mind at all. Not at all. No one does much anymore, do they? Look at Waldheim.’
‘I’ve heard the rumors,’ Brunetti said.
Padovani sipped at his glass, considering how to phrase it. ‘All right, how about nationality? There are at least three Americans I could name, two Germans, and half a dozen Italians who would have been glad to see him dead.’
‘But that hardly means they’d kill him,’ Paola said.
Padovani nodded, granting this. He kicked off his shoes and pulled his feet up under him in the chair. He might be willing to vilify the countess’s taste, but he would never stain her new brocade. ‘He was a Nazi. Take that as given. His second wife was a suicide, w
hich is something you might look into. The first left him after seven years, and even though her father was one of the richest men in Germany, Wellauer gave her a particularly generous settlement. There was talk at the time of nasty things, nasty sexual things, but that,’ he added, sipping again, ‘was when there still existed the idea that there were sexual things that could be nasty. But before you ask, no, I don’t know what those sexual things were.’
‘Would you tell us if you did?’ Brunetti asked.
Padovani shrugged.
‘Now for things professional. He was a notorious sexual blackmailer. Any list of the sopranos and mezzo-sopranos who sang with him ought to give you an idea of that; bright, young, anonymous things who suddenly sang a Tosca or a Dorabella and then just as suddenly disappeared. He was so very good that he was permitted these lapses. Besides, most people can’t tell the difference between great singing and competent singing anyway, so few people noticed, and no great harm was done. And I have to give him the credit that they were always at least competent singers. A few of them even went on to become great singers, but they probably would have done that without him.’
To Brunetti, this hardly sounded sufficient to provoke murder.