Drawing Conclusions (20 page)

He went into the bar. A dark-haired woman was the only client, sitting at a table near the window. He approached and asked, ‘Signora Orsoni?’

She looked at him without smiling or extending her hand. ‘Good afternoon, Commissario,’ she said and nodded towards the seat opposite her.

He pulled the chair away from the table and sat. Before he could say anything, the barman approached their table and they asked for coffee; then Brunetti changed his mind and asked for a glass of white wine and a panini.

When the man moved away, they studied one another, each waiting for the other to speak. Brunetti saw a woman in her early fifties, with light eyes in surprising contrast to her dark hair and olive skin. She had made no attempt to colour the grey in her hair: that and the crow’s feet around her eyes spoke of a lack of concern with maintaining the appearance of youth.

‘I’m Maddalena Orsoni, Commissario. I set up Alba Libera, and I’ve run it since it began.’

‘How long ago was that?’ he asked, displaying no surprise at her refusal to engage in the usual social preliminaries to conversation.

‘Four years.’

‘May I ask why you started it?’

‘Because my brother-in-law killed my sister,’ she said. Though she must have given this same answer many times, Brunetti suspected she was curious about the effect of such brutal honesty. He acknowledged her statement, however, with only a nod, and she went on. ‘He was a violent man, but she loved him. He said he loved her. There was always a reason for his violence, of course: he’d had a hard day; something was wrong with dinner; he saw her looking at another man.’

Hearing her recite this made him wonder how many times she had told this story, but it also reminded him of how often he had heard the same explanations given from men in justification of violence, rape, murder.

The barman came and served them. Brunetti couldn’t bring himself to touch his toast, not while her words still echoed between them.

‘Go ahead and eat,’ she said, pouring some sugar into her cup. She stirred it slowly, watching it dissolve.

Brunetti’s stomach, perhaps at the proximity to what was going to have to substitute for the lunch he had lost, growled. She smiled, finished her coffee and set the cup down. ‘Please. Eat.’

He tried to do as he was told: the toasting had done nothing to improve the taste of processed white bread, nor had the heat managed to melt the processed cheese or bestow taste upon the cooked ham. Cardboard would have been worse, he supposed. He put the panini back on his plate and took a sip of wine. That, at least, was tolerable.

‘She didn’t want to call the police,’ Signora Orsoni continued: Brunetti realized she had not finished telling the story of her sister. ‘And then she was afraid to call them. He broke her nose, and then her arm, and then she did call them.’ She looked at him, a level glance, appraising. ‘They did nothing.’ Brunetti asked for no explanation. ‘There was no place she could go.’ She caught his expression and said, ‘Or would go. I was living in Rome, and she never told me anything was wrong.’

‘Your family?’

‘There were only two old great-aunts left, and they knew nothing.’

‘Friends?’

‘She was six years younger, and we were never at the same school together. So we didn’t have any friends in common.’ She shrugged this away. ‘That’s the way it was. It’s not something women talk about, is it?’

‘No, it’s not,’ Brunetti said and drank more wine.

‘She was a lawyer,’ Signora Orsoni said, giving a lopsided smile, as if asking him to believe, please, that she wasn’t making this up, and who could believe that her sister could have been so stupid. ‘After she finally called the police – after her arm – they took him away, but the prison was full, so he was given house arrest.’ She paused to see what this representative of the legal system would have to say to that, but Brunetti remained silent.

‘So
she
moved out, and then she got a separation, and when that didn’t keep him away, she got an injunction against him. He had to stay at least a hundred and fifty metres from her.’ Orsoni caught the barman’s attention and asked for a glass of mineral water.

‘She wanted to move away – they were both still living in Mestre. She had left him the apartment when she moved out, but her job was there, and …’ Brunetti wondered how she would manage to say what she had to say, something he had heard many people say, after. ‘And I suppose she didn’t have any idea about him.’ The barman brought the water. She thanked him for it and drank half, then set the glass down.

‘One night he went to her new apartment with a gun, and he shot her when she opened the door. Then he shot her three more times, and then he shot himself in the head.’ Brunetti remembered the case: four, five years ago.

‘You came back?’

‘Do you mean then, when she was killed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, I came back. And I decided to stay and do something
new. If I could.’

‘Alba Libera?’ he asked.

Perhaps hearing scepticism in the way he pronounced the name, she said quickly, ‘Well, it
is
dawning liberty for most of these women.’ Brunetti nodded, and she went on. ‘It took me two years to set it up. I was already managing an NGO in Rome, so I was familiar with the system and knew how to get the permissions and money from the state.’

He liked the fact that she called it ‘money’ and did not bother with all the euphemisms people used. And now that she was talking about procedure and routine, the angry undertone had disappeared from her voice.

She went on. ‘She should have gone to another city: she could have found work. The law couldn’t protect her, but she didn’t want to believe that. There was no safe house, no place where she could go and live and be with people who would try to protect her.’

Brunetti knew well how little chance a person in danger had of getting any sort of protection from the state. The current government was doing everything in its power to eviscerate the existing witness protection programme: there were too many people saying embarrassing things in court about the Mafia. These witnesses provided information, at least, in return for safety: imagine the chance of protection being offered to a woman who had nothing to offer the state in return.

Perhaps she too heard the tinge of outrage creeping into her voice. ‘I think that’s enough explanation. At least you know why I started it. We have a number of houses, most of them out on
terra ferma:
here in the city, we have some people who will give a room to the women we send them and not ask questions.’

‘Are they safe here?’

‘Safer than where they come from. Much.’

‘Always? They don’t get found?’

‘It happens,’ she said, pushing her glass to one side without picking it up. ‘Last year, near Treviso, there was a case.’

Brunetti searched his memory but could come up with nothing. ‘What happened?’

‘Her boyfriend found out where she was – we never learned how he did or who told him – and came to the home where she was living and asked for her.’

‘What happened?’

Her face softened, as if to announce that there would be some lessening of misery in this story. ‘The old woman she was staying with – she’s almost ninety – said she didn’t really understand what he was talking about, she lived alone, but told him he looked like a nice boy, so she invited him in to have a coffee. She told me she left him alone in the living room while she went to the kitchen.’

She saw Brunetti’s fear for the old woman, and for the younger one, so she explained, ‘She’s a wily old thing, told me her parents had a Jewish friend live with them all during the war. That’s where she learned the rules she imposes.’ In response to Brunetti’s unspoken question, she said, ‘No items of any sort from their old lives, not even underwear. Everything they wear is kept in her closet and drawers, mixed in with her things. And every time they leave the apartment, no matter for what, they have to leave their room looking as though no one uses it.’

‘Just in case?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Just in case.’

‘What happened?’

‘She took as long as she could making the coffee, and all the while she could hear him moving around in the other rooms. He went into the guest room. Then he came into the kitchen, and she gave him a coffee and some biscuits, and she started talking about her grandchildren and telling him what a fine-looking young man he was, and was he married, and soon he got up and left.’

‘And?’

‘And we moved her to another city that night.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘You’re very efficient.’

‘We have to be. Some of these men are very clever. And all of them are violent.’

She made no gratuitous reference to her sister here, and Brunetti was glad of that.

‘And Signora Altavilla?’

‘A cousin of hers told her about us. She and I had a talk, and she told me she would be willing to help us. She was a widow, lived alone, had an extra room, and there were three other apartments in the building.’ Seeing Brunetti’s puzzled expression, she explained, ‘It means people are constantly going in and out of the building.’

‘How long ago was this?’

She tilted her head to the right while she searched her memory.

‘Two, three years ago, I’d say. I’d have to check my records.’

‘Where are your offices, if I might ask?’ Brunetti said, though that would be easy enough to find out.

‘Not far from here,’ she said, irritating him with the unnecessary evasion.

Brunetti continued, ‘Did anything similar to what happened to that old woman – a man coming to the house or suspecting that someone was staying there – ever happen to Signora Altavilla?’

She put her hands on the table and laced her fingers together. ‘She never said anything.’ By way of explanation, she added, ‘We give clear instructions about that. The house owner has to report anything – even if it’s only a suspicion – immediately.’ Then she said, with a weary smile, ‘Not everyone is as clever as that old woman.’

‘Do you know if she was ever troubled by anything one of her guests told her?’

Her smile grew warmer. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said.’

Momentarily confused, Brunetti said, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘To call them guests.’

‘It seems to me that’s what they are,’ he answered simply, ignoring her attempt at diversion. ‘Did this ever happen, that she was troubled by something she heard?’

Signora Orsoni raised her chin and pulled in air, creating a noise Brunetti could hear from the other side of the table. ‘No, not really. That is, she never told me about anything like that.’ She gave him an evaluating glance, then said, ‘Usually these women talk very little.’ She offered no further explication, though Brunetti still felt she had something else to say.

‘But?’ he encouraged.

‘But it came the other way,’ she said, confusing him again. ‘That is, a woman who was staying with her said she thought something had upset Costanza.’

‘What exactly did she say?’ Brunetti asked, trying to hide his rush of interest.

Orsoni rubbed her forehead, as if to show Brunetti how hard she was trying to remember. ‘She said that when she went to stay with her, Costanza seemed a very calm person, but then after she had been there for a few weeks, Costanza came home one day looking troubled. She thought it would pass, but the mood she came home in seemed to linger.’

‘Where had she gone? Did she know?’

‘She said the only places Costanza ever went were to visit her son and to see the old people in the nursing home.’

‘When did she tell you this?’

‘When she was leaving – when I was going to the airport with her. It must have happened about a month ago, so perhaps Costanza’s spirits improved after that.’

‘Did this woman ask her about it?’

Signora Orsoni spread her palms out flat. ‘You have to understand the dynamic here, Commissario. You call these women guests, but it’s not like that. They’re in hiding. Some of them go out to work, but most of them stay home, and the only thing they can do is worry about what’s going to happen to them.’

She looked at him to be sure she had his full attention and continued. ‘Bad things have happened to these women, Commissario. They’ve been beaten, and raped, and men have tried to kill them, so it’s difficult for them to concern themselves with the problems of other people.’ She paused, as if to measure the sympathy with which he greeted this, and then said, ‘They find it hard even to imagine that people like the ones they stay with – who have homes, and jobs, who don’t have financial problems, and who aren’t at risk – it’s hard for them to think that these people can have problems.’ She stared across the table at him. ‘So the amazing thing is not that she didn’t ask what was wrong but that she even noticed that something was. Fear cripples people,’ she said, and he thought of her sister.

‘You say you took her to the airport?’ he asked.

Displaying no surprise that her words had failed to deflect him, she said, ‘She left. I told you that.’

‘Why?’

‘Her husband was arrested.’

‘For what?’

‘Murder.’

‘Who?’

‘His lover.’

‘Ah,’ escaped Brunetti, but then he asked, ‘And so?’

‘And so she could go back to her home.’ Signora Orsoni’s tone made this sound like a simple choice, even an obvious one. Perhaps it was.

‘Who came then?’

He watched as she formulated an answer. ‘Another young woman, but she’d left before Costanza died.’

‘Tell me about her,’ Brunetti said.

‘There’s nothing to tell, really. Only what she told me.’ At Brunetti’s encouraging nod, she went on. ‘She’s from Padova. She was in university there, studying economics.’ She paused but Brunetti waited her out, and she added, ‘Her family’s very … traditional.’ When Brunetti did not respond to that word, she went on. ‘So when she told them she had a boyfriend,’ she began, then added, ‘who’s from Catania … they told her she had to choose between him and them.’ She shook her head at such things in this day and age. ‘So she chose the boyfriend and went to live with him.’

‘How did she get to Signora Altavilla?’ he asked, if only to show her that he had not been distracted by this story of the young woman, no matter how traditional her family.