Wilful Behaviour (25 page)

She gave him a long, steady look and answered, ‘I’m his daughter.’

Brunetti thanked her, did not offer to shake her hand, and left.

21

AWARE THAT ANY
decision concerning what he thought of as Signora Jacobs’s murder must wait upon Rizzardi’s report, Brunetti found himself purposeless and without the will to do any specific thing. He did not want to go back to work, nor did he want to begin to question the people who lived near the old woman; least of all did he want to think about Claudia Leonardo and her death. He walked.

He set off from Filipetto’s and cut back toward San Lorenzo, but when he reached the bridge in front of the Greek church his courage failed him and he ducked into the underpass rather than continue to the Questura. He passed through Campo Santa Maria Formosa and saw what looked like a tribe of Kurds camped in front of the
abandoned
palazzo
, their meagre possessions spread in front of them as they squatted and stooped on bright-coloured carpets. The men wore sober suits and black skullcaps, but the women’s long skirts and scarves flared out in orange, yellow, and red. Their uninterest in passers-by seemed total; all they lacked were campfires and donkeys; they could just as easily have been in the middle of the plains.

He crossed Santi Apostoli, continued past Standa, then turned to the right and back toward the waters of the
laguna
. He passed the Misericordia and the stone relief of the turbaned merchant leading his camel, and then cut right again, walking by instinct until he came out at the vaporetto stop at Madonna dell’ Orto. A vaporetto was just pulling off to the right, but when the pilot saw him he threw the motor into idle, then reverse, and backed up to the
embarcadero
, engine throbbing a command to step aboard. The sailor slid the metal bars back and Brunetti jumped on, although he had had no intention of taking a boat.

As the vaporetto pulled into Fondamente Nuove he made a decision and switched to another one that was leaving for the cemetery. He got off there, the one man among a crowd of women, most of them old and all of them carrying flowers. As he had done since he started walking, he moved forward by instinct alone, as if his feet were entirely in charge of the rest of his body.

He turned right through the cloister, then went up and down low flights of steps until he stood in front of the marble plaque behind which rested his
father
’s bones. He read the name and the dates. Brunetti was almost as old as his father had been when he died, and he had as many children. It had always been his mother’s custom to come out here to discuss things with her husband after his death, though he had not, even when living, been much help to her in deciding anything. Once Brunetti had asked her about it, and she said only that it helped her to feel close to someone again. Years passed before he accepted the bleak criticism of her remark, but by then his mother had slipped through the hands of love and concern and drifted into the waters of the senile and the mad, and so he had never been able to ask her pardon or make it up to her.

The flowers resting in a small silver vase below the plaque were fresh, but Brunetti had no idea who might have left them: perhaps his brother or his sister-in-law? Most assuredly it had not been their children or his own: young people seemed to have no interest in the cult of the dead, and so the graves of his generation would probably be left flowerless and unvisited. Once Paola was gone, who would come to talk to him here? Had anyone questioned him or had Brunetti thought to question himself, he would have attributed his assumption that he would be the first to die to a wealth of statistics: men died first, and women lived on alone. But the real answer probably lay in some fundamental difference in their characters: Paola usually opted for light and the forward leap into life, while his spirit felt more comfortable one step back from the stage, where things were less
well
illuminated and he could study them and adjust his vision before deciding what to do.

He placed his right hand on the letters of his father’s name. He stood for a moment, then glanced to his left, at the long row of tombs lined up in their orderly ranks, one on top of the other, each occupying the same amount of space. Soon enough, both Claudia Leonardo and Signora Jacobs would take their places here. In the neatly tended field behind him stood the marble tombs of the wealthy, enormous monuments in every shape and style. He thought of Ivan Ilych, advising his family to forgo, and he thought of Ozymandias, King of Kings, but he thought most of how little real emotion he felt standing here, at his father’s tomb. He left the cemetery and took the boat back to Fondamente Nuove.

Brunetti had to search for a public phone with which to call Vianello and tell him he wouldn’t be back in the office that afternoon. As was usual in an age when everyone was encouraged to have a
telefonino
, it proved impossible to find a public phone, so Brunetti ended up going into a bar and ordering a coffee he didn’t want in order to justify using their phone. After he spoke to Vianello he called home, but there was no one there, just his own voice giving the phone number and asking him to leave a message.

In a state of complete inattention, Brunetti passed through the city and towards his home, almost dizzy with the desire to be there. So glad was he to arrive that he actually leaned against the front door after he closed it, though the action
made
him feel like the heroine of some cheap melodrama, relieved at having escaped the menaces of the slavering suitor who still lurked beyond the door.

Eyes closed, he said aloud, ‘God, I’ll be hiding under the bed next.’

From his left, he heard Paola say, ‘If this is the first sign of madness, I’m not sure I’m ready for it.’ He turned and saw her standing at the door to her study, a book in her hand, smiling.

‘I doubt it’s the first sign you’ve seen,’ he said and pushed himself away from the door. ‘Why are you home this afternoon? It’s Tuesday, isn’t it?’

‘I put a note on my office door, saying I was sick,’ she explained.

He studied her face: her eyes glistened with good humour, her skin with health. ‘Sick?’ he asked.

‘Of sitting in my office.’

‘But never of the books?’ he asked.

‘Never,’ she asserted, then asked, ‘Why are you home so early?’

‘As you heard me saying, I want to hide under the bed.’

She turned back into her study, saying, ‘Come and tell me about it.’

Twenty minutes later Brunetti had told her all there was to say about the death of Signora Jacobs and his belief that it had been neither natural nor accidental.

‘Who would want to kill them both?’ Paola asked, sharing his conclusion that the two deaths had to be related.

‘If I knew why, it would be easy enough to find out who,’ Brunetti answered.

‘The why has got to be the paintings,’ Paola pronounced, and Brunetti saw no reason to question her conclusion.

‘Then all we’ve got to do is wait until a will is found or a notary presents one for probate?’ he asked sceptically.

‘That seems a bit simplistic to me,’ Paola answered. She gazed at the wall of books opposite them for a long time and then said, ‘It’s all very much like
The Spoils of Poynton
.’

‘Tell me,’ he prodded, knowing that she would, even if he didn’t ask.

‘It’s one of the Master’s novellas. It’s all about possession of a house full of beautiful objects and reveals what people are really like by the way they respond to the objects.’

‘For example?’ Brunetti asked, always finding it easier to have Paola tell him about the books of Henry James than actually to read them.

‘Well, I think it would be easier if you read it yourself,’ she said.

Brunetti said only, ‘Give me one example.’

‘The woman’s son – that is, the son of the woman who owns all of the beautiful things – has no appreciation of the beauty of her possessions, is deaf or blind to them, just as he’s blind and deaf to the young companion of his mother, who would be the ideal wife for him, instead of the young woman he gets engaged to. He can’t appreciate their obvious beauty, and he can’t appreciate her hidden beauty.’ She thought about what she’d said
for
a moment, then added, in quick apology to the Master, ‘The story tells this far better, but that’s pretty much what it’s about.’

‘All right, I’ll ask,’ Brunetti said when he realized she had finished. ‘How do you connect this with Signora Jacobs?’

He sat and watched her trying to formulate an answer he would understand. Finally she said, ‘In the end, are things more important than people? Which do you pull from the burning building, the Rembrandt or the baby? And how, in this greedy age of ours, do you separate beauty from value?’

‘Now tell me without the rhetorical questions,’ he asked.

She laughed at his answer, not at all offended, and went on. ‘I think it’s a sign of some sort of spiritual illumination to respond to beauty,’ she began, letting him know he was in for one of her convoluted explanations, though he did not doubt that it would lead somewhere interesting. ‘But I think our age has so transformed art into a form of investment or speculation that many people can no longer see the beauty of an object or care much about it if they do: they see only the value, the convertibility of the object into a particular sum of money.’

‘And is that bad?’ he asked.

‘I think so,’ she said, glancing at him and then smiling again as she added, ‘but you know what a terrible snob I am.’ When he did not take advantage of the pause she left him to deny this, she went on, ‘I think that once we convert beauty into financial value, we’re willing to go to different
lengths
to acquire it. That is, I don’t find it at all strange that a person should kill to obtain a painting that they viewed only in terms of how much money it’s worth, but I can’t imagine that anyone would kill in order to obtain one painted by his favourite artist simply because he admired it.’ She laid her head back against the top of the sofa, closed her eyes, then opened them and went on. ‘Different goals drive people to different lengths. Or perhaps different people are driven by different goals. At any rate, I think people will do more if they are after something they view as a manifestation of money than if they view it as a manifestation of beauty.’

‘And in this case?’ he asked.

‘Murder’s pretty far,’ she said by way of an answer.

‘And the mad art collector who wants to own everything?’ Brunetti asked.

‘There are probably some, but I suspect very few of them go about stabbing young girls or killing old women to get the things they want. Besides, no one knows yet where these pieces are going to end up, do they?’

Brunetti shook his head. That was the still unanswered question.

She broke into his silence by saying, ‘I remember what you always say, Guido.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That crime is always about money, sex or power.’ And, indeed, he often did say that, simply because he had seen so little evidence of other motives. ‘Well, if Claudia was a virgin and Signora
Jacobs
was over eighty, then I think we can exclude sex,’ she went on. ‘And I can’t see how power could be an issue, can you?’ He shook his head, and she concluded by asking, ‘Well?’

He was still mulling over Paola’s thoughts when he arrived at the Questura the following morning. He went directly to his office without bothering to tell anyone he was there. The first thing he did was call Lucia Mazzotti in Milano and was surprised when the girl answered the phone herself. She sounded like a different person, all timidity gone from her voice, and Brunetti marvelled at the ability of the young to recover from everything. He began with the usual platitudes but, aware that the girl’s mother might be there, he quickly turned to the business of his call and asked if Claudia had ever said anything to her about someone who was too attentive to her or bothered her with his attentions. The line went silent. After a long time Lucia said, ‘She got phone calls. A couple of times when I was there.’

‘What sort of phone calls?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Oh, you know, from some guy who wants to go out with you or just talk to you. That you don’t want to talk to or see.’ She spoke with authority, her youth and her beauty ensuring that calls like this would be part of her normal experience. ‘That’s what I thought from the way she talked.’

‘Do you have any idea who this man might be, Lucia?’

There was a long silence, and Brunetti wondered why Lucia should be reluctant to tell
him
, but at last she said, ‘I don’t think it was always a man.’

‘Excuse me,’ Brunetti said. ‘Would you explain that to me, Lucia.’

Sounding a little impatient, Lucia said, ‘I told you. It wasn’t always a man. One time, about two weeks ago, Claudia got a call, and the person who called was a woman. But it was the same kind of call, from someone she didn’t want to talk to.’

‘Would you tell me about it?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I answered the phone, and she asked for Claudia.’

Brunetti wondered why she hadn’t told him this while he was questioning her, but then he remembered that the girl’s flatmate lay dead above them when they spoke, and so he kept his voice calm and asked, ‘What did she say?’

‘She asked to speak to Claudia,’ Lucia repeated simply in a tone that suggested only an idiot wouldn’t recall what she had just said.

‘Do you remember if she asked for Claudia or Signorina Leonardo?’ Brunetti asked.

After a long pause, the girl said, ‘I don’t remember, really, but it might have been Signorina Leonardo.’ She thought again and then said, all impatience gone from her tone, ‘I’m sorry, I really don’t remember. I didn’t pay much attention since it was a woman. I thought it would be work or something.’

‘Do you remember what time it was?’

‘Before dinner some time.’

‘Could it have been the Austrian woman?’

‘No, she had an accent, and this woman didn’t.’

‘Was she Italian?’

‘Yes.’

‘Venetian?’

‘I didn’t listen to her long enough to know. But I’m sure she was Italian. That’s why I thought it was about work.’