Authors: Donna Leon
23
BRUNETTI WALKED AWAY
with knees he was surprised to find unsteady. He didn’t know if it was the effect of the woman’s strange gesture, one that had, he realized, created in him the obligation to see that she received the money that would bring her family to her, or whether his response was to the importance of the receipts she had given him.
From a bar he called Lele Bortoluzzi and arranged to meet him at his gallery in twenty minutes, which is what he estimated it would take him to get there if he took the 82 from Rialto. When he arrived, the artist was talking to a client, an American who insisted on looking at all of his paintings, asking about the technique, the kind of paint, the light, Lele’s mood when he painted each
picture
and who, after almost a quarter of an hour, left the gallery without buying anything.
Lele came over to Brunetti, who stood in front of a seascape, and embraced him, then kissed him on both cheeks. The closest friend of Brunetti’s late father, Lele had always displayed a paternal concern and affection for him, as if he could thus make up for Brunetti’s father’s inability to display whatever emotion he felt for his sons.
With a nod of his head towards the painting, Brunetti said, ‘That’s beautiful.’
‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ the artist replied without the least awkwardness. ‘Especially that cloud on the left, there, just above the horizon.’ He placed the tip of his right forefinger just above the canvas, then tapped the end of his nail on the cloud once, twice. ‘It’s the most beautiful cloud I’ve ever painted, really wonderful.’
It was unusual for Lele to comment on his own work, so Brunetti took a closer look at the cloud, but all he saw was still a cloud.
He put the manila envelope on the table, opened it and took out the wrapped drawing, careful to pull it out straight and not bend the cardboard. He laid it on the table and said, ‘Take a look.’
The painter slipped the tissue-covered drawing out from inside the cardboard, pulled back the paper, saw what it protected, and an involuntary, ‘
Mamma mia
’ escaped his lips. He looked at Brunetti, but the beauty of the drawing drew his eyes back to it again. Still staring at it, moving his eyes to every corner, following every line of the dead Christ’s body, he asked, ‘Where did you get this?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘Is it stolen?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Brunetti answered, then, after thinking for a while, he said more authoritatively, ‘No, it’s not.’
‘What do you want me to do with it?’ Lele asked.
‘Sell it.’
‘You’re sure it’s not stolen?’ the painter asked.
‘Lele, it’s not stolen, but I need you to sell it.’
‘I won’t,’ the painter said but before Brunetti could protest or question him, he added, ‘I’ll buy it.’
Lele picked it up and walked nearer to the light that filtered in through the door and windows. He held the drawing up closer to his eyes, then moved it away, then came back and set it down on the table. He brushed lightly across the bottom left hand corner of the drawing with the last finger of his right hand. ‘The paper’s right. It’s Venetian, sixteenth century.’ He picked it up again and studied it for what seemed like minutes to Brunetti. Finally he set it down again and said, ‘At a guess, I’d say it’s worth about two hundred million. But I have to check the prices on the last few auctions, and I know Pietro sold one about three years ago, so I can ask him what he got for it.’
‘Palma?’ Brunetti asked, naming a famous art dealer in the city.
‘Yes. He’ll lie, the bastard. He always does, but I can figure out what he really got from what he tells me. But it’s going to be somewhere between
one
hundred and fifty and two hundred.’ Very casually, too casually, Lele asked, ‘Is it yours?’
‘No, but I’ve been given it to sell.’ This was, in a certain sense, true; no one had asked him to sell it, but it was certainly his to sell. Immediately he began to worry about the money, how to see that Salima got it, where to put it until she could find a way to use it. ‘Can it be cash?’ he asked.
‘It’s always cash in things like this, Guido. It leaves no footprints in the snow.’
Brunetti couldn’t remember how many times he’d heard the painter say just this, and it was only now that he appreciated how true it was, and how very convenient. But then he wondered what he’d do with this much money. To put it in the bank could cause trouble: the Finanza would be interested in finding out how a senior police official suddenly came by so much cash. They had no safe in the house, and he could hardly imagine himself putting it in his sock drawer.
‘How do you want me to pay you, and when?’ the painter asked.
‘I’ll let you know. It’s not for me, but this person doesn’t have any way to keep it.’ Brunetti quickly ran through various possibilities, and at the end said, ‘Why don’t you keep it until I have some idea of how to get it to her.’
Lele obviously had no interest in who the owner might be, not now that he considered himself the real owner of the drawing. ‘Do you want some now?’ he asked, and Brunetti realized the painter was eager to have some formal acknowledgement that he had bought the drawing.
‘It’s yours, Lele,’ Brunetti said. ‘I’ll talk to you next week about what to do about the money.’
‘Fine, fine,’ Lele muttered, eyes drawn down again by the dead Christ.
While he had the painter there, Brunetti decided to take advantage of his knowledge. He took out the other envelope and removed the various bills of sale. Choosing one at random, he handed it to Lele and asked, ‘Tell me about this.’
Lele took it, read it quickly, then went back and read through the declaration of sale and, even more slowly, the list of paintings and drawings it named. ‘
Caspita
,’ he said, placing it flat on the table and taking more. He read two or three, laying each one flat on the table in front of him after he’d read it. When he placed the fourth one down, he said, ‘So that’s where they went.’
‘You recognize things?’
‘Some of them, yes. At least I think I do from the descriptions. Things like “Iznik carnation tile” are too general, and I don’t know much about Turkish ceramics, anyway, but something described as, “Guardi View of the Arsenale” I do recognize, especially when I see that it came from the Orvieto family.’
Pointing down at the opened sheets of paper, Lele asked, ‘Are these the things in the old woman’s apartment?’
‘Yes.’ Brunetti wasn’t completely sure, but there seemed no other explanation.
‘I hope it’s guarded,’ Lele said, causing Brunetti immediately to recall the thickness of the door that guarded Signora Jacobs’s apartment and then
Salima
and the keys he had not thought of asking her to return to him.
‘I ordered an inventory,’ Brunetti said.
‘And lead us not into temptation.’
‘I know, I know, but now that we have these,’ Brunetti said, holding up the bills of sale, ‘we know what’s in there.’
‘Or was,’ Lele added drily.
Though it was, he realized, a poor defence of the police, Brunetti explained, ‘The two who were sent to do it, Riverre and Alvise, are idiots. They wouldn’t know the difference between a Manet and the cover of
Gente
.’ After a pause he added, ‘Though they’d probably prefer the second.’
The aesthetic sensibilities of law enforcement professionals not being of vital interest to the painter, he asked, ‘What will happen to it all?’
Brunetti shrugged, a gesture that conveyed his uncertainty and his unwillingness to speculate with someone not involved with the investigation, even a friend as close as Lele. ‘For the time being it will stay there, in her apartment.’
‘Until what?’ Lele asked.
The best Brunetti could think of to answer was, ‘Until whatever happens.’
At lunch that day, an unusually silent Brunetti listened as family talk swirled around him: Raffi said he needed a
telefonino
, which prompted Chiara to say that she needed one as well. When Paola demanded what either of them needed it for, both said it was to keep in touch with their friends or to use in case they were in danger.
When she heard this, Paola cupped her hands at the corners of her mouth, creating a megaphone, and called across the table to her daughter, ‘Earth to Chiara. Earth to Chiara. Can you hear me? Come in, Chiara. Can you read me?’
‘What’s that mean,
Mamma
?’ Chiara demanded, making no attempt to disguise her annoyance.
‘It’s to remind you that you live in Venice, which is probably the safest place in the world to live.’ As Chiara started to object, Paola ran right over her: ‘Which means that it is unlikely that you are going to be in danger here, aside from
acqua alta
, that is, and a
telefonino
isn’t going to be much help against that.’ And again, as Chiara opened her mouth, Paola concluded, ‘Which means no.’
Raffi attempted to render himself as invisible as it was possible to be while eating a second piece of pear cake buried in whipped cream. He kept his eyes on his plate and moved slowly, like a gazelle attempting to drink from a pool it knew to be infested with crocodiles.
Paola did not strike, but she did float to the surface and peer at him with reptilian eyes. ‘If you want to buy yourself one, Raffi, go ahead. But you pay for it.’ He nodded.
Silence fell. Brunetti had been somewhere else during all of this or at least he had not been paying much attention to the scuffle, though Paola’s disapproval of what she considered their children’s profligacy had caught his attention. With no preparation, he asked out loud, addressing them all equally, ‘Aren’t you ashamed that you pay all of your attention to acquiring as much money as you
can
, without giving any thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?’
Surprised, Paola asked, ‘Where’d all that come from?’
‘Plato,’ Brunetti said and began to eat his cake.
The rest of the meal passed in silence, Chiara and Raffi exchanging inquisitive looks and shrugs, Paola trying to figure out the reason for Brunetti’s remark or, more accurately, to understand which particular circumstances or actions had led him to recall the quotation, which she thought she recognized from the
Apology
.
After lunch he disappeared into the bedroom, where he took off his shoes and lay down on the bed, staring out the window at the clouds which, he realized, were not to be blamed for looking so happy. After a time, Paola came in and sat beside him on the edge of the bed.
‘You talked about retiring a while ago. Is this a relapse?’
He turned his head towards her and reached out with his left hand to take hers. ‘No. I suppose it was nothing more than a sudden attack of moral tiredness.’
‘Understandable, given your job,’ she agreed.
‘Maybe it’s because we have so much, or I’m becoming allergic to wealth, but I just can’t understand how people can do some of the things they do in order to get money.’
‘Like kill, do you mean?’
‘No, not only that. Even lesser things, like lie and steal and spend their lives doing things they don’t like doing. Or, if you’ll let me say this, how
some
women can stay married to horrible men simply because they have money.’
She sensed the deadly earnestness in his voice and so resisted the impulse to joke and ask if he were talking about her. Instead, she asked, ‘Do you like what you do?’
He pulled her hand closer and idly began to turn her wedding band around and around on her finger. ‘I think I must. I know I complain about it a lot, but, in the end, it does do some good.’
‘Is that why you do it?’
‘No, not entirely. I think part of it is that I’m nosy by nature, and I always want to know how the story will end or how or why it got started. I want to know why people do things.’
‘It will never make any sense to me, that you don’t like Henry James,’ she said seriously.
24
IT WASN’T UNTIL
a week later that anything other than the routine shuffling of papers occurred in the investigation of the deaths of the two women, and then it came via that most Venetian of methods: the exchange of information resulting from friendship and a sense of mutual obligation. A functionary of the Office of the Registry of Public Documents, recalling that Signorina Elettra, who was the sister of his wife’s doctor, had once displayed an interest in Claudia Leonardo and Hedwig Jacobs, called her one morning to tell her that the will of the second woman had been registered in their office two days previously.
Signorina Elettra asked him if it would be possible for him to fax her a copy of the will, and at his response, that it would be ‘highly irregular but
equally
possible’, she laughed and thanked him, thus providing him with the unspoken assurance that a certain latitude might be extended to him were he ever to come to the attention of the police. She broke the connection and immediately called Brunetti, suggesting he come down to her office.
He had no idea why she wanted to speak to him, and when he entered her office he heard the noise of the fax machine. Saying nothing, she stood and walked over to the fax, and as a sheet of paper stuck its tongue out, she made a deep bow and waved one hand toward the emerging paper, inviting Brunetti to look. Curious, he bent over it, starting to read even as the machine was giving birth. ‘I, Hedwig Jacobs, Austrian citizen but resident in Venice, Santa Croce 3456, declare that I have no living relatives who can make a claim on my estate.’ He read the first sentence, glanced across to Signorina Elettra, who watched him, her self-satisfaction evident only in a small grin. The paper jolted forward and he bent over it again. ‘I desire, therefore, that all of my possessions, in the event of my death, be given to Claudia Leonardo, also resident in this city, granddaughter of Luca Guzzardi. If for any reason this bequest does not pass to her, I will that it pass irrevocably to her heirs. I further declare that six Tiepolo drawings in my possession, so marked on the back of the frames, be given to the Director of the Biblioteca della Patria in memory of Luca Guzzardi and to be used as he decides in pursuit of the goals of the Biblioteca.’ It was signed and dated about ten days before Claudia Leonardo’s death. Seeing only
whiteness
under her signature, he looked back at Signorina Elettra, but then the machine pushed out another few centimetres of paper, and as he watched there emerged the name and signature of the notary with whom the will had been registered. ‘Massimo Sanpaolo.’ The signatures of the two witnesses were illegible.