A Question of Belief

29

As Brunetti had both known and feared, Patta proved resistant to the idea of questioning Signor and Signora Fulgoni — separately — about their movements on the night of Fontana’s death. Patta also pointed out that there was no way to constrain a person to submit a DNA sample for ‘purposes of elimination’. Nor, indeed, for any reason.

Brunetti still winced at the memory of his superior’s response to his explanation of why he wanted to question the Fulgonis. ‘You want me to jeopardize my position because you think he might be gay?’ Even though the Vice-Questore was no friend of homosexuals, the force of his anger had pulled him up from his chair and halfway across his desk. ‘The man is a bank director. Have you any idea of the trouble this would cause?’

Thus the workings of Patta’s mind. Those of the mechanism controlling the bells of Madonna dell’Orto were no less strange, they having ceased to work two weeks before. The parocco, when Brunetti spoke to him, explained that it was impossible, during the long holiday, to find anyone who would come to fix them, and so they tolled neither the passing hours nor the passing of life.

Prompted by his curiosity about why one of the Fulgonis should lie, Brunetti began to wonder about the other. Banks must be like any other business, he reflected, different only because their product was money, not pencils or garden forks. This similarity dictated that employees would gossip and that the reputations of the people in power would be coloured — if not entirely fashioned — by that gossip. It was common knowledge at the Questura that Signorina Elettra — for reasons that she had never fully explained and that no one had ever fathomed — had left her job at the Banca d’Italia to come and work at the Questura, so Brunetti asked her to check among her friends who still worked in that sector to see what rumours existed about bank director Lucio Fulgoni.

Signorina Elettra came up to his office on the afternoon of the day he had made his request. He waved her to a chair. ‘I take it you’ve discovered something, Signorina?’

‘Not much, and nothing definite, I’m afraid,’ she said, sitting opposite him.

‘What does that mean?’ he asked.

‘That there is a certain amount of talk about him.’

He did not interrupt to ask what sort of talk: even if the man was a bank director, gossip would most likely centre on his sexual life.

‘What speculation exists — at least this is what two people have told me — concerns his sexual preference.’ Before Brunetti could comment, she added, ‘Both of these people told me they’d heard others say they thought he was gay, but no one seems able to provide any evidence of this.’ She shrugged, as if to suggest how common this situation was.

‘Then why is there talk?’ Brunetti asked.

‘There’s always talk,’ she answered immediately. ‘All a man has to do is behave a certain way, make a particular remark, and someone will start to talk about him. And once it starts, it can only get worse.’ She looked across at him. ‘The fact that there are no children is used as evidence.’

Brunetti closed his eyes for a moment, then asked, ‘Has he ever approached anyone at the bank?’

‘No. Never, at least not that my friends have heard about.’ She thought for a moment and then added, ‘If anything had actually happened, everyone would know about it. You have no idea how conservative bankers are.’

Brunetti steepled his fingers and pressed his lips against them. ‘The wife?’ he asked.

‘Rich, socially ambitious, and generally disliked.’

Brunetti decided to keep to himself the observation that this would describe the wives of many of the men he dealt with.

‘One gets the sense, listening to people,’ she permitted herself to say, ‘that the third would be true of her, even without the first two.’

‘Have you met her?’ he asked.

She shook the question away and said, ‘But you have.’

‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered. ‘I can see why people might not like her.’

Signorina Elettra did not bother to ask for an explanation.

‘Maybe we’re asking the wrong people for information about him,’ Brunetti finally said, giving in to the temptation that had nagged at him since his conversation with Patta.

‘And we should be asking rent boys, instead of bankers?’

‘No. We should be asking the Fulgonis directly.’ He realized, as he said it, that his soul was tired of backstairs gossip, tired of listening from the eaves and consorting with informers. Ask them directly and have done with it.

Brunetti, as a kind of anticipatory punishment for going against Patta’s direct warning not to persecute the Fulgonis, submitted himself to the flagellation of the sun as he walked to their apartment. As he passed the wall relief of the Moor leading his camel, Brunetti was tempted to consult with him on how best to treat the Fulgonis, but all the Moor had wanted to do for centuries was to lead his pack-laden beast off that palazzo wall in Venice and back to his home in the East, so Brunetti resisted the impulse.

He announced himself to Signora Fulgoni, who buzzed him into the courtyard without question or protest. Before starting towards the stairs, Brunetti made a half-circle of the courtyard; the chalked outline of Fontana’s body had long since been washed away, leaving behind only a wispy grey trail that ran off into the small drain holes in the middle of the courtyard. The scene of crime tape had disappeared, but the heavy chains still sealed closed the storerooms.

As she had the last time, Signora Fulgoni awaited him at the door to the apartment, and again she made no attempt to take his outstretched hand. Seeing her, hair perfectly brushed into place, looking even more like a caryatid with pink lipstick, Brunetti wondered if she had perhaps found a way to keep herself vacuum packed for days at a time. He followed her down the corridor and into the same room, which conveyed the same impression of being for display rather than for use.

‘Signora,’ he said, when they were seated opposite one another, ‘I’d like to ask you a few further questions about the evening of Signor Fontana’s death. I’m not sure we’ve understood everything you told us.’ He did not waste a smile after saying this.

She looked surprised, almost offended. How could a policeman have misunderstood what she said? And how could anyone, regardless of his rank, think of questioning the accuracy of her statements? But she would not ask: she would wait him out.

‘You said that, just as you and your husband turned off Strada Nuova, while you were taking a walk to escape the heat of the evening, you heard the bells of La Madonna dell’Orto ringing midnight. Are you sure it was midnight, Signora, and not, perhaps, the half-hour or perhaps even as much as an hour later?’ Brunetti’s smile was even blander than the question.

As the mistress of the dacha would gaze at the serf who questioned her word about the proper spoons to use for tea, Signora Fulgoni stared at Brunetti for long seconds. ‘Those bells have been ringing for generations,’ she said with indignation she was too polite to make fully manifest. ‘Are you suggesting I would not recognize them or that I would not understand the time they were ringing?’

‘Certainly not, Signora,’ he said with a self-effacing smile. ‘Perhaps you mistook the bells of some other church that are less accurate?’

She allowed small cracks to appear in the wall of her patience. ‘I am a member of this parish, Commissario. Please permit me to recognize the bells of my own church.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Brunetti said neutrally, surprising her, perhaps, by the fact that her last words had not caused him to fall off his chair and crawl towards the door. ‘You said, Signora, that you and your husband had no familiarity with the dead man.’

‘That is correct,’ she said primly, folding her hands on her knees to enforce the words.

‘Then how can it be,’ he began, deciding to take a stab, ‘that traces of both Signor Fontana and your husband were found in the same place in the courtyard?’

Had he really stabbed her, Brunetti could have caused no greater shock. Her mouth opened, and she raised a hand to cover it. She stared at him as if seeing him for the first time and not liking what she saw. But in an instant she had gained control and wiped away all sign of surprise.

‘I’ve no idea how that could be possible, Commissario.’ She devoted some moments to this mystery and then volunteered, ‘Of course, my husband might have met Signor Fontana in the courtyard and not thought it important enough to mention it to me. Helped him move something, perhaps.’

It was not in Brunetti’s experience that bank directors aided with the moving of heavy objects, but he let her remark pass with a pleasant nod suggestive of belief.

‘And your husband didn’t leave the apartment without you that evening, Signora? Perhaps to get some fresh air? Or to get some wine from your storeroom?’

She sat up straighter and said, voice tight, ‘Are you suggesting that my husband had something to do with that man’s death?’

‘Of course not, Signora,’ Brunetti — who was suggesting exactly that — said calmly. ‘But he might have seen something unusual or something out of place, and mentioned it to you and then perhaps forgot about it himself: memory is a very strange thing.’ He watched this idea work its way into her mind.

She looked at one of the paintings on the far wall, studied it long enough to memorize its strict horizontality, and then looked back at him. She pressed her lips together and looked down, then up at him with a look of embarrassed surprise, ‘There was one thing. .’

‘Yes, Signora?’

‘The sweater,’ she said, as though she expected Brunetti to understand what she was talking about.

‘Which sweater, Signora?’ he asked.

‘Ah,’ she said, as if suddenly coming back to the room and recalling the circumstances of the conversation. ‘Of course. The light green sweater. It was a Jaeger he bought years ago, a V-neck. He bought it when we were in London on vacation. And he had the habit of putting it over his shoulders whenever we went out for a walk.’ Then, before Brunetti could ask, ‘Yes, even in this heat.’ Her voice grown suddenly softer, she went on, ‘It had become a sort of talisman for him, well, for both of us when we went out in the evening.’

‘And what happened with the sweater, Signora?’

‘When we got back here that night, my husband realized it wasn’t over his shoulders.’ She crossed her arms and put her hands on her own shoulders and found no sweater there. ‘So he went downstairs immediately to look for it. There hadn’t been many people on the street, so if it had fallen off, he thought it might still be wherever he dropped it.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘Did he find it?’

‘Yes. Yes. When he came back, he said it was on the ground just at the foot of Ponte Santa Caterina. Almost at the Gesuiti.’

‘So he retraced the route of your walk, Signora?’ Brunetti asked, after calculating the distance between their home and the bridge.

‘He must have. I was in bed by then, so all I asked was whether he had found the sweater, and when he told me he had, I’m afraid I went right to sleep.’

‘I see, I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘It’s surprising he said nothing about this in the statement he gave to Lieutenant Scarpa.’

‘As you said, Commissario, memory is a strange thing.’ Then, before he could say it, she continued, ‘It’s strange, as well, that I didn’t remember this until now.’ As if to emphasize just how odd all of this really was, she put a hand to her forehead and gave him a vague look.

‘How long do you think he was gone, Signora?’ Brunetti asked.

She did that familiar Venetian thing of gazing off while memory walked the distance. ‘It would take about fifteen minutes to get to the bridge, I suppose, because he would have been walking slowly. So twice that,’ she said, then, as if uncertain that he could work out the maths unaided, she supplied the sum: ‘Half an hour at most.’

‘Thank you, Signora,’ Brunetti said and got to his feet.

By the time Brunetti got to Signor Fulgoni’s bank, his jacket was plastered to his back, and his trousers bunched together uncomfortably between his legs at every step. He stepped into the air-conditioned foyer and paused to wipe his face and neck with his handkerchief. Luckily, the created temperature was mild, rather than arctic, and Brunetti soon adjusted to it. He crossed the marble-floored lobby and approached a desk behind which sat a crisp-suited young woman. She glanced up and must have seen a dishevelled man in a wrinkled blue jacket, for she asked with badly disguised disdain, ‘May I help you, Signore?’ She spoke in Italian but with an undisguised Veneto cadence.

Brunetti took out his wallet and showed his warrant card. ‘I’d like to speak to Signor Fulgoni,’ he said, careful to speak Veneziano. Then, imitating the thick accent of the friends with whom his father had played cards in the osterie of Brunetti’s youth, he added, ‘I want to talk to him about a murder.’

The young woman got to her feet with a speed that, had there been no air conditioning, would have brought sweat to her brow. She looked at Brunetti, off to the left, and then picked up the phone and dialled a number.

‘There’s someone here who would like to speak to Dottor Fulgoni,’ she said; then, after listening for a moment, added, ‘He’s a policeman.’ She looked at Brunetti with a placating smile, said ‘Sì,’ said it again, and set down the phone.

‘I’ll take you there,’ she said, careful not to get too close to Brunetti. She turned and started to walk towards the back of the bank.

Brunetti had once read an article in a publication he could no longer recall that discussed the location of the various rooms in a house in terms of atavistic memories of danger. The rooms where people were at their weakest were invariably placed — or so the article maintained — farthest from the point of entry, the place where danger would burst into the house. Thus bedrooms were on the second floor or at the back of the house, forcing the invader, it was suggested, to fight his way through less well-defended positions with his sword or club, thus alerting the owner and giving ample time to prepare for escape or defence.

Brunetti had no doubt that Signora Fulgoni would have phoned her husband by now, perhaps hoping to give him enough time to slip out a back window or to start sharpening his axe.

Two desks stood on either side of a door at the back of the bank, as though they were bookends and the door some rare piece of incunabula. Another young woman stood in front of one desk; the other was empty.

The first woman stopped and said, raising a hand in Brunetti’s direction, ‘This is the policeman.’

Brunetti fought down the impulse to growl and wave his hands in their faces, but then he remembered that, in the land where money was god, policemen were not meant to enter the places of worship. Instead, he smiled amiably at the second young woman, who turned and opened the central door without bothering to knock. There was to be no surprising Dottor Fulgoni.

The man was already moving towards Brunetti. He was dressed in a sober dark grey suit. His tie was maroon, with some sort of fine pattern on it, and he had a maroon handkerchief in his breast pocket. As the man approached, Brunetti hunted for the signs of femininity he had noticed at the funeral and, seeking, found none.

His steps were precise, his hair and features well cut, and his eyebrows pointed arches over his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Commissario; they didn’t give me your name,’ Fulgoni said in a voice that was reassuringly deep. He shook Brunetti’s hand and led him to a sofa that sat on one side of the office.

Brunetti introduced himself as they crossed the room and chose to seat himself in the leather chair that stood in front of the sofa; Fulgoni took the sofa. He had sharply-defined cheekbones and a long nose. ‘May I offer you something, Commissario?’ Fulgoni asked. He had an attractive voice, very musical, and he spoke Italian from which had been erased all sign of Veneto accent or cadence.

‘Thank you, Dottore,’ Brunetti said. ‘Perhaps later.’

Fulgoni smiled and thanked the young woman, who left the office.

‘My wife called me and told me about your visit,’ Fulgoni said. ‘She said there was some confusion about the time we got back to our home the night Signor Fontana was killed.’

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, ‘among other things.’

Fulgoni did not pretend to be surprised by this. ‘I assume my wife has clarified the time we got home.’

‘Yes, and she told me about your sweater, and your going out to look for it,’ Brunetti said.

Fulgoni did not respond but sat quietly, studying Brunetti’s face while allowing his own to be studied. Finally he said, ‘Ah, yes. The sweater.’ The way Fulgoni pronounced that last word told Brunetti that it had enormous significance for him, but Brunetti had no idea what the significance might be.

‘She said you realized, when you got back from your walk, that you had lost a green sweater. She said the sweater was important to you — I think “talisman” was the word she used — so you went back outside to look for it.’

‘Did she tell you that I found it?’

‘Yes, and that you told her you had when you came back.’

‘And then?’

‘And then, she said, she went to sleep.’

‘Did she tell you, by any chance, how long I was out? Looking for the sweater?’

‘She wasn’t sure, but she said it was about half an hour.’

‘I see,’ Fulgoni said. He pushed himself back in the sofa, sitting up a bit higher. He met Brunetti’s gaze for a moment but then glanced away and fixed his eyes on the far wall. Brunetti did not interrupt his reflections.

A minute passed before Fulgoni said, ‘My wife told me that you — the police — have found traces of me and Signor Fontana in the courtyard. In the same place in the courtyard, to be exact.’

‘That’s true.’

‘What traces?’ he asked, cleared his throat, and then added, ‘And where?’

Trapped in his own lie, Brunetti waited some time before answering the question. Fulgoni glanced at him but then looked away, and Brunetti decided to risk saying, ‘I think you know the answers to both those questions, Dottore.’

Only a man with the habit of honesty or one sufficiently ingenuous to be deceived by Brunetti’s air of certainty would have found that a satisfactory answer to his questions.

‘Ah,’ escaped Fulgoni’s lips in a single long breath, the sort of noise a swimmer makes when hauling himself out of the pool at the far end, race over. ‘Would you tell me again what my wife said?’ he asked in a voice he struggled to keep calm.

‘That you went out for a walk with her to escape the heat in your apartment, and that when you came back, you realized you had dropped your sweater, and that you then went out for about half an hour and came back with it.’

‘I see,’ Fulgoni said. Looking directly at Brunetti, he asked, ‘And do you think this would have been enough time for me to go downstairs and kill Fontana? To have beaten his head in against that statue?’

With no hesitation, Brunetti said, ‘Yes,’ and added, ‘There would have been time enough.’

‘But that doesn’t mean I did it?’ Fulgoni asked.

‘Until there is a motive, your killing him would make no sense,’ Brunetti answered.

‘Of course,’ Fulgoni said, ‘and how — what’s the English word, “sporting?” of you to tell me.’

Brunetti was more surprised by the sentiment than by Fulgoni’s use of the word.

‘Would those samples you say you’ve found supply a motive?’ Fulgoni asked.

‘Yes, they would,’ Brunetti answered, intensely conscious of Fulgoni’s phrasing: ‘you say you’ve found’.

Fulgoni startled Brunetti by getting suddenly to his feet. ‘I think I don’t want to be in the bank any more, Commissario.’

Brunetti rose but remained silent.

‘Why don’t we go to my home and have a look, then?’ Fulgoni suggested.

‘If you think that will help things,’ Brunetti said, though he had no idea, not really, of what he meant by that.

Fulgoni reached for his phone and asked that a taxi be called for him.

The two men stood side by side on the deck, not speaking, as the taxi carried them up the Grand Canal and under the Rialto. The day was sun-bright, but the breeze on the water kept them from feeling the heat. In Brunetti’s experience, tension drove most people to talk, and the tension that filled Fulgoni was easily read in the white of his knuckles as he grasped the taxi’s railing. But anger just as often kept them silent as they used their energy to run over the past, perhaps seeking the place or time where things went wrong or flew out of control.

The taxi pulled up at the same place Foa had used the day the body was discovered. Fulgoni paid the driver and added a generous tip, then stepped on to the embankment. He turned to see if Brunetti needed a hand, but he was already beside him.

Still not speaking, they walked down the embankment and over the bridge. They stopped at the portone and Brunetti waited while Fulgoni pulled out his keys and opened the door.

Fulgoni led the way to the storeroom that held the birdcages and drew up sharp in front of the padlocked chain. ‘I assume it’s there that you found your samples?’ he asked, pointing inside.

Brunetti had thought to get the keys from the evidence room and pulled them from his pocket. He fitted the various keys in the lock until he found the right one, removed the lock and opened the door. It was almost noon, so the sun beat down squarely upon them and cast no light into the storeroom. Fulgoni reached inside and switched on the light.

Ignoring the birdcages, he walked straight to the boxes piled beside them. Brunetti watched as he read the labels, though his body blocked Brunetti from reading them. At last he reached up and slid one out, creating a small avalanche as the boxes above it collapsed to fill the space. He placed it on a small round table with a scratched surface that Brunetti had overlooked. Fulgoni picked at the tape, dry and difficult to remove, that sealed the box and pulled it loose in a single long strip. Turning to Brunetti, he said, ‘Perhaps you’d like to open it, Commissario.’

He moved past Fulgoni and pulled back the first flaps, then the next two. A grey turtleneck sweater lay on the top.

‘I think you have to look deeper, Commissario,’ Fulgoni said and then gave a dry laugh in which there was no humour whatsoever.

Brunetti folded back the sweater; beneath it was a thick blue sweater with a zipper. And beneath that was a light green V-neck sweater. ‘Yes, look at the label,’ Fulgoni said at the same instant Brunetti’s eyes fell upon the Jaeger tag.

Brunetti let the other sweaters fall back into place and closed the flaps of the box. He turned to Fulgoni and said, ‘Does this mean you did not go out in search of your sweater?’

‘This box was packed at the end of winter, Commissario,’ Fulgoni said. ‘So, no, I wasn’t wearing it, and I did not drop it. And so I did not go out in search of it.’ He placed the sweater carelessly on top of the pile of boxes, then bent to pick up the dry strip of tape from the floor.

Keeping his eyes on the brown tape as he wrapped it around two fingers, he said, ‘My wife doesn’t like mess. Or disorder.’ He slipped the paper cylinder into his pocket, looked at Brunetti and said, ‘I’ve always tried to respect her wishes.’ He nodded towards the birdcages and said, ‘That’s proof that I did, I suppose. We didn’t have children, so one year she decided that she wanted birds. She filled the house with them.’ He waved a magician’s arm over the empty cages. ‘But they died or they grew sick, so we gave them away. Well, the ones that weren’t sick.’

‘And those that were?’ Brunetti asked, as he felt he was being asked to do.

‘My wife disposed of them when they died,’ Fulgoni said. He turned to Brunetti. ‘I’ve always been far more sentimental than my wife, so I wanted to bury them over on the other side of the courtyard, under the palms.’ He made a vague gesture beyond the door of the storeroom. ‘But she put them in plastic bags and had the garbage man take them away.’

‘But you kept the cages?’ Brunetti said.

Fulgoni ran his eye over the stacks of wooden bird houses and said, puzzled by it, ‘Yes, we did, didn’t we? I wonder why that was?’

Brunetti knew this was a question not in search of an answer.

‘Maybe my wife likes cages,’ Fulgoni said with a desolate smile. ‘I’d never thought of it that way.’ He walked over and pulled the grated door of the storeroom towards them until it closed and then stood for a moment with his hands holding two of the upright bars, looking out at the courtyard. Then he turned to face Brunetti and asked, ‘But which side is the cage, do you think, Commissario? In here or out there?’

Brunetti was a man of infinite patience, so simply stood and waited for Fulgoni to speak again. He had seen this moment many times before and had come to think of it as a kind of unravelling or unhinging, when a person decides that things have to be made clear, if only to himself.

Fulgoni put the tips of the fingers of his right hand on his lips, as if to give evidence of how deep in thought he was. When he removed his fingers, his lips and the area around them were stained a dark brown; Brunetti’s eyes fled to Fulgoni’s hands, but he saw there only the rust from the bars, not Fontana’s blood.

Brunetti closed his eyes, suddenly aware of the heat of this cage in which the two of them were trapped.

‘I’d like to show you something, Commissario,’ Fulgoni said in an entirely normal voice. When Brunetti looked at him, he saw that the banker was wiping his hands with the handkerchief from his jacket pocket. Brunetti was struck by the way his hands grew cleaner without making the handkerchief darker.

Fulgoni moved past Brunetti and returned to where the cages were stacked. He studied them for a moment, then leaned down to examine one on the bottom row. He bent and put his hands on either side of it and started to wiggle it back and forth, working it free from the other cages trapping it.

He yanked it out, and the cages imitated the boxes by collapsing into the space where it had been, landing askew.

Fulgoni carried the cage to the table and set it beside the box. ‘Have a look, Commissario,’ he said, stepping back to remove his shadow, which the light cast across the cage.

Brunetti bent to study it: he saw a wooden birdcage, thin ribs of bamboo, the classic ‘Made in China’ construction. On the bottom, instead of newspaper, lay a piece of red cloth. It seemed to be woven of light cotton, and near the back Brunetti could see a separate piece: could it be a sleeve? Yes, that was it, a sleeve, and there was the collar, right at the back. A sweater then, a red cotton sweater, summer weight. Fulgoni stood beside him, motionless and silent, so Brunetti returned his attention to the cloth, puzzled that the other man should want him to look at it. Just below the neck there appeared a figure, or at least a change in colour. Darker than the rest of the sweater, it was amorphous: a flower, perhaps? One of those big things like a peony? An anemone?

There, on the top of the sleeve, was another flower, this one smaller and darker. Drier.

Brunetti reached to open the door of the cage but before he could, Fulgoni put a hand on his arm, saying, ‘Don’t touch it, Commissario. I don’t think you want to contaminate the evidence.’ There was no trace of sarcasm in his voice, only concern.

Brunetti looked at the sweater for a long time before he asked, ‘How careful were you when you put it in there?’

‘I picked it up with my handkerchief after she went back upstairs. I didn’t know what would happen, but I wanted there to be some. .’

‘Some what?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Something that would show what had happened.’

‘Would you tell me what that was?’

Fulgoni moved closer to the door, perhaps in search of cooler air. Both of them were sweating heavily, and the birdcages, since being disturbed by Fulgoni, emanated a foul, dusty odour.

‘Araldo and I had use of one another. I suppose you could say it that way. He seemed to like things to be quick and anonymous, and I had no choice but to settle for that.’ Fulgoni sighed, and in the process must have drawn in some of the air disturbed by the cages, for he started to cough. The force of it bent him forward, and he covered his mouth with his hand, smearing the rust stains further.

When the coughing stopped, he stood upright and continued. ‘We would meet here. Araldo called it,’ he said with conscious melodrama and a wave of his arm at the low ceiling, the dust-tinged beams, ‘our own little love nest.’ He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped at his face, spreading the rust, but lighter now, across his forehead.’My wife knew, I suppose. My mistake was to think she didn’t care.’

He said nothing more for so long a time that Brunetti asked, ‘And that night?’

‘It was almost as my wife told you, except that it was her sweater that was dropped. A red cotton sweater. I said I’d go out and look for it. It wasn’t as far as Santa Caterina, but just on the other side of the first bridge. When I went out, I saw that the door to Fontana’s mailbox was open: that was the signal we used. If I saw it when my wife and I came home together, I’d make some excuse about going out for a walk, and I’d come downstairs and ring his doorbell from out in the calle, so he’d have an excuse to go out. And when he came down, we would retreat to our bower of love.’

‘Is that what happened?’

‘Yes. I put the sweater on the railing of the staircase, where it would be safe. And then Araldo came down. It never took long. Araldo didn’t want to waste time on talk or anything like that. When we were finished, he always went out first: we were careful about that.’

‘But not always?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Signor Marsano, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

Fulgoni shook his head at the memory. ‘We were in the courtyard one time when he opened the door. It’s not that we were doing anything, but it must have been obvious to him.’ Fulgoni shrugged. ‘It was another reason we were careful. After that, I mean.’

‘And that night?’

‘Araldo left first and was crossing the courtyard, when I heard her voice. The light was out in here, so I thought if I just stayed quiet maybe everything would be all right. And then I’d stop. I always wanted to stop,’ he said, voice wistful. ‘But I knew I wouldn’t.’

Fulgoni wiped his face again, and Brunetti was about to suggest they go out into the courtyard when the other man continued. ‘So I stayed in here, trapped, and listened to them argue. I’d never heard her talk like that before, never heard her lose control.’ Fulgoni turned and started to nudge the birdcages into line. As they fell or slipped into place, dust rose from them and he started coughing again.

When the coughing stopped, he went on. ‘Then I heard a noise. Not a voice, but a noise, and then more noises and then a voice, but very short, and then more noises. And then I didn’t hear anything more.’

Fulgoni pointed to the sofa. ‘I was there, lying there with my pants down around my ankles, so it took me time to go and see what had happened.’ Then, in a voice he forced to be stronger, he said, ‘No, that’s not the reason. I was afraid of what I would find.

‘I heard footsteps going up the staircase, but I still waited. When I finally got to the door. . there,’ he said, pointing to the door that still closed them off from the courtyard, ‘the light was on and I saw him on the ground. But the light’s on a timer and it went out. So I had to walk back to the switch and turn it on again, walking through the dark, knowing he was there, on the ground.’ He stopped for what seemed a long time.

‘When I came back, I saw what she had done. She must have seen the sweater on the railing when she came down, so she knew I was here. And then she saw him coming out, and it was. .’

‘And the sweater?’

‘It was lying beside him. She must have had it in her hands when she. .’ For a moment, Fulgoni looked as though he would be sick, but that passed and he went on. ‘I took out my handkerchief. I’d realized how things would look or could look. I didn’t want anything to happen to her.’ Then, like a man discovering honesty, or courage, he added, ‘or to me.’

He took two deep breaths after saying that, then said, ‘So I wrapped my hand in my handkerchief and brought the sweater back in here and put it in the cage. I moved it around to flatten it out a little.’

‘What did you do then, Signore?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I locked up this room and went back upstairs and went to bed.’