Drawing Conclusions

21

Brunetti was relieved to be quit of her, accepting only then how little he had warmed to this woman. Her half-truths, delays, and attempts to manipulate him had annoyed him; worse, she seemed concerned with Signora Altavilla’s death only to the degree that it was a source of guilt for herself or potential danger for her ridiculously named Alba Libera. How little they care about people, those people who wanted to help humanity.

He mulled over these things while starting on his way back to the Questura, but then, as if emerging from a dream, he suddenly noticed how much light had departed the day. He glanced at his watch and was astonished to see that it was almost five. He judged it foolish to return to the Questura but did not change the direction of his steps, seeing himself from above as he plodded along like an animal on its way back to the barn. At the Questura, he went to Signorina Elettra’s office and found her at her desk, reading what appeared to be the same book he had noticed the last time. She looked up when she heard him come in and casually closed it and slid it aside. ‘You have the look of someone who has brought more work,’ she said, smiling.

‘I just spoke to the leader of Alba Libera,’ he said.

‘Ah, Maddalena. What did you think of her?’ she asked with complete neutrality, offering no clue to what her own opinion might be.

‘That she likes helping people,’ Brunetti answered with equal neutrality.

‘That certainly seems a worthy desire,’ Signorina Elettra allowed.

Brunetti wondered when one of them would give in and express an opinion.

‘She reminds me a bit of those women in nineteenth-century novels, interested in the moral improvement of their inferiors,’ she said.

For a moment, Brunetti weighed the possibility that more than a decade’s exposure to his view of the world had affected hers, but then he realized how self-flattering this was: Signorina Elettra surely had her own ample reserves of scepticism.

Suddenly impatient with sparring, he said, ‘One of the women she helped was staying with Signora Altavilla up until the evening before her death, but it turns out this woman has stayed in other houses, in similar circumstances…’

‘And has made off with the silver?’ Signorina Elettra joked.

‘Something like that.’ He watched her surprise register and liked the fact that she was surprised.

‘Her name?’ she enquired.

‘Gabriela Pavon, though I very much doubt it’s her real name. And the man from whom she was supposedly hiding is Nico Martucci, a Sicilian. That probably is his real name. Lives in Treviso.’ When she began to write down the names, Brunetti said, ‘Don’t bother. I’ve got a friend in Treviso who can tell me. It’ll save time.’

He turned to leave but she said, pointing to some papers on her desk, ‘I’ve found out a few things about Signora Sartori and the man she lived with.’

‘So they aren’t married?’ he asked.

‘Not in the records of the nursing home. Her entire pension goes directly to them, and her companion Morandi pays the rest.’ Then, seeing his surprise, she added, ‘He wouldn’t have to pay, since they’re not married. But he does.’ Brunetti thought of the red-faced man he had met in Signora Sartori’s room.

‘What does it cost?’ Brunetti asked, thinking of what he and his brother had had to pay for their mother for all those years.

‘Two thousand, four hundred a month,’ then, when he raised his eyebrows, she said, ‘It’s one of the best in the city.’ She raised a hand and let it fall. ‘And those are the prices.’

‘How much is her pension?’ he asked.

‘Six hundred euros. She left four years early, so she isn’t eligible for the whole pension.’

Before he tried the maths, Brunetti asked, ‘And his?’

‘Five hundred and twenty.’ Together, their pensions covered barely half of the cost.

The man had not seemed wealthy; nor, Brunetti had to admit, had she. If he was what he seemed, a pensioner in need of paying utilities, rent, and food, where did he find the money for the nursing home?

She picked up the papers and handed them to him; he was surprised to find more than a few sheets. What could two old people like that have done in their lives?

‘What’s in here?’ he asked, holding it up with deliberate exaggeration.

With her most sibylline look, Signorina Elettra observed, ‘Their lives have not been without event.’

Brunetti allowed himself to relax into a smile for what seemed the first time that day. He waved the papers, saying, ‘I’ll have a look.’ She nodded and turned her attention to her computer.

In his office, he first dialled his home number.

Paola answered with a ‘Sì’ so devoid of patience as to discourage even the most hardened telephone salesman or to frighten her children into hurrying home to clean their rooms.

‘“And the voice of the turtle dove is heard in our land,”’ he could not stop himself from saying.

‘Guido Brunetti,’ she said, voice no more friendly than it had been with that impersonal ‘Sì’, ‘don’t you start quoting the Bible at me.’

‘I read the Song of Songs as literature, not as a sacred text.’

‘And you use it as a provocation,’ she said.

‘Merely following in the tradition of two thousand years of Christian apologists.’

‘You are a wicked, annoying man,’ she said in a lighter voice, and he knew the danger was past.

‘I am a wicked, annoying man who would like to take you to dinner.’

‘And lose out on turbanti di soglie, eaten in peace at your own table, in the midst of the joyous harmony of your family?’ she asked, leaving him uncertain whether the thought of his presence or of the meal had changed her mood.

‘I’ll try to be on time.’

‘Good,’ she said, and he thought she was about to hang up, but she added, ‘I’m glad you’ll be here.’ Then she was gone, and Brunetti was left feeling as though the temperature of the room had just risen or the light had somehow increased. More than twenty years, and she could still do this to him, he thought; he shook his head, hunted for the number of his friend in Treviso, and called.

As he had suspected, the woman’s name was not Gabriela Pavon: the Treviso police could give him six aliases used by the woman whose fingerprints were all over the apartment she had shared with her companion, but they could not supply him with her real name. The Sicilian – Brunetti told himself he had to stop calling him that and, more importantly, thinking of him as that – taught chemistry in a technical school, had no criminal record, and was, at least according to the police there, the victim of a crime. There was no trace of the woman, and his friend was resigned enough to suspect that there would be none until she committed the same crime again in some other part of the country.

Brunetti told him what the woman was probably planning to do in Venice and was asked by his weary friend to send a report, ‘not that it’s going to make any difference. She didn’t commit a crime.’

When he hung up, Brunetti turned his attention to the papers Signorina Elettra had given him. Signora Maria Sartori had been born in Venice eighty years ago; Benito Morandi, eighty-three. The man’s first name struck Brunetti: well he understood what sort of family would name their son Benito in those years. But the sight of the two names joined together prodded Brunetti’s memory, as if Ginger had suddenly rediscovered her Fred. Or Bonnie her Clyde. He looked away from the papers, focusing his memory and not his eyes, and followed the meandering stream of recollection. Something about an old person, but not one of them; some other old person, and when they were not old. It was a memory from his life before work, before Paola and all that came from knowing her. His mother would remember, he caught himself thinking, his mother as she had once been.

He dialled Vianello’s telefonino number. When the Inspector answered, Brunetti asked, ‘You downstairs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come up for a minute, would you?’

‘I’m on my way.’

Staring helped. Brunetti went to the window, looked across the canal, letting the names rumble around in his mind, hoping that putting them together and then separating them would nudge his memory.

Vianello found him like that, hands clasped behind his back, deep in contemplation of either the façade of the church or the three-storey house for vagrant cats that had been built in front of the façade.

Rather than speak, Vianello sat in one of the chairs in front of his superior’s desk. And waited.

Without turning, Brunetti said, ‘Maria Sartori and Benito Morandi.’

There was silence from Vianello, the sound of his heels sliding across the floor as he stretched his legs. More time passed, and then came the long sigh of dawning memory. ‘Madame Reynard,’ he said and permitted himself a smile at having got there first.

Any Venetian, at least one their age, would have remembered sooner or later. Now that Vianello had given him the name, Brunetti also had the memory. Madame Marie Reynard, already a legendary beauty, had come to Venice with her husband almost – could it be? – a century before. They had had five years or so before he died a spectacular death. Brunetti couldn’t recall the means: car, boat, aeroplane. The totality of her grief had cost her their unborn child, and upon her recovery she had lapsed into widowhood and seclusion in their palazzo on the Canal Grande.

He no longer knew when he had first heard the story, but even before Brunetti reached middle school, Madame Reynard had become legend, as is the destiny of mourning spouses, at least if they are both beautiful and rich. The mysterious French woman never left her palazzo, or she left it at night to walk the streets in silent tears, or she allowed only priests to enter, with whom, draped in her widow’s veil, she recited endless rosaries for the repose of her husband’s soul. Or she was a recluse, crucified by grief. Two elements remained constant in all variants: she was beautiful and she was rich.

And then, more than twenty years ago, aged one hundred, widowed for three-quarters of a century, she died. And her lawyer – who had nowhere appeared in any of the legends – turned out to have inherited the palazzo and all it contained, as well as the lands, the investments, and the patent to a process that did something to the strength of cotton fibres, making them resistant to higher temperatures. Whatever it did – and the cloth changed from cotton to silk to wool, depending on the version told – the patent ended up being immeasurably more valuable than the palazzo or the rest.

‘Of course, of course,’ Brunetti said as the tiny figures in his memory moved together and Maria found her Benito: for those were the names of the witnesses to Madame Reynard’s will – Sartori and Morandi – and as such the subject of gossip and speculation that had occupied the city for months. They had worked in the hospital, had no previous knowledge of the dying woman, were certainly not named as beneficiaries of the will, and so were judged to be extraneous to the matter. Brunetti went back to his desk.

‘Weren’t there some French relatives?’ Vianello asked.

Brunetti rummaged through the stories that had been dislodged in his memory and came up with the one he sought: ‘They turned out not to be relatives but people who had read about her fortune and thought they’d have a try at it.’ He let more information seep in and then added, ‘But yes, they were French.’

Both sat for a while, letting their memories gather up bits and pieces. ‘And wasn’t there an auction?’ Vianello asked.

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said. ‘One of the last great ones. After she died. They sold everything.’ Then, because it was Vianello he was talking to, and he could say such things to him, Brunetti added, ‘My father-in-law said every collector in the city was there. Every collector in the Veneto, for that matter.’ Brunetti knew of two drawings from that auction. ‘He got two pages from a notebook of Giovannino de Grassi.’

Vianello shook his head in ignorance.

‘Fourteenth century. There’s a whole notebook in Bergamo, with drawings – paintings, really – of birds and animals, and a fantasy alphabet.’ His father-in-law kept his two drawings in a folder, out of the light. Brunetti held up his hands about twenty centimetres apart. ‘These are only loose pages, about this big. Beautiful.’

‘Valuable?’ asked the far more pragmatic Vianello.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ Brunetti said. ‘But I’d guess so. In fact, my father-in-law said that most collectors went because of her husband’s collection of drawings – it wasn’t like today, when you could check everything that was in the auction by going online. He said there were always surprises. But this time, the surprise was that there were so few drawings. Still he managed to get those two.’

‘Pity about Cuccetti, isn’t it?’ Vianello asked, surprising Brunetti by remembering the name of the lawyer who had swept the board.

‘What, that he died so soon after? What was it, two years?’

‘I think so. And with his son. The son was driving, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, and drunk. But it was all hushed up.’ Both of them knew a fair bit about this sort of thing. ‘Cuccetti had a lot of important friends,’ Brunetti added.

As if Brunetti’s statement were the night, and his question the day, Vianello asked, ‘The will was never contested, was it?’

‘Only by those French people, and that didn’t last a day.’ Leaning across his desk Brunetti retrieved the papers Signorina Elettra had given him and said, ‘This is what she found.’ He read the first sheet and passed it to Vianello. In amiable silence, neither thinking it necessary to comment, they read through the papers.

Maria Sartori had been a practical nurse, first at the Ospedale al Lido, and then at the Ospedale Civile, from which she had retired more than fifteen years before. Never married, she had lived at the same address as Benito Morandi for most of their adult lives. She had kept an account at the same bank during her working life, into which modest sums were deposited and then withdrawn. She had never been in hospital, nor had she ever come to the attention of the police. And that was all: no mention of joy or sorrow, dreams or disappointments. Decades of work, retirement and a pension, and now a room in a private casa di cura, paid for by her pension and the contribution of her companion.

Attached was a photocopy of her carta d’identità; Brunetti barely recognized the soft-featured woman who gazed out at the world from the photo: surely she could not be the ancestor of the woman with the deeply lined face he had seen. He fought off the temptation to whisper to the younger face how right she had been: trouble comes.

As he handed the second sheet to Vianello, Brunetti turned his attention to her companion. Morandi had served in the Second World War. Brunetti’s first thought was that Morandi must have lied about that, but then he did the numbers and saw that it was just barely possible.

Brunetti’s father had often referred to the chaos that had prevailed during those dreadful years, so he believed that a boy in his early teens might have been allowed to enlist at the very end. But then Brunetti read Morandi’s service record, stating that he had seen service in Abyssinia, Albania, and Greece, where he had been wounded, sent home, and discharged back into civilian life.

‘No, eh?’ Brunetti heard himself say aloud, startling Vianello, who turned to look at him. If the date of birth in this file was true, then Morandi would have gone off to Greece when he was as young as twelve, and he would have been only sixteen when Italy surrendered to the Allies. No matter how eager to name their son ‘Benito’ his family might have been, few families would have allowed their adolescent son to follow the other Benito off to war.

A few years after Morandi’s return – or at least after documentary evidence of his war service had entered the record – he took a job at the port of Venice and remained there for more than a decade, though no more precise job description than ‘manual labourer’ was provided. Brunetti learned that he had been dismissed from this job without explanation.

Some years later, he began working as a cleaner at the Ospedale Civile. Brunetti leaned aside and picked up the papers Vianello had set on his desk; Signora Sartori was already working at the Ospedale by then.

Morandi had worked as a portiere and cleaner for more than two decades and had retired about twenty years before, entitled to a minimal pension.

Brunetti recognized the seal of the Ministry of Justice on the next three sheets of paper, which catalogued Morandi’s relationship with the forces of order, to which he was no stranger. He had first been arrested when he was in his early thirties, charged with selling smuggled cigarettes to tobacco shops on the mainland. Five years later, he was arrested for selling items stolen from ships being unloaded at the port and was given a one-year suspended sentence. Seven years after that he was arrested for having assaulted and seriously injured a colleague at work. When the man failed to testify against him, the charges were dropped. He had also been arrested for resisting arrest and for passing stolen goods to a fence in Mestre. There was some sort of clerical error in the processing of evidence in that case, and after five years it was abandoned, though by then Signor Morandi seemed to have passed to the side of the angels, for he had not been arrested since the time he had begun work at the hospital.

The last sheets of paper concerned Signor Morandi’s life as a fiscal being. About the time of his retirement, Morandi bought an apartment in San Marco without taking out a mortgage to do so. A note in Signorina Elettra’s handwriting informed Brunetti that he and Signora Sartori had moved into that apartment soon thereafter, for both of them had changed residence to that address within months of the purchase.

His bank account, completely undisturbed by the purchase of the apartment, showed much the same routine seen in Signora Sartori’s: modest deposits and withdrawals, and, since the purchase of the apartment, the monthly payment of a condominium fee. This fee had risen during the years and was now more than four hundred euros a month and thus could no longer easily be offset by his modest pension.

From the time Signora Sartori had entered the nursing home Signor Morandi’s banking habits had changed. A month before her first bill was due, his account had been credited with a deposit of almost four thousand euros. Since then, every three or four months, a deposit of between four and five thousand euros was made, and each month more than twelve hundred euros was routinely transferred from his account to that of the nursing home.

That seemed to be that. Brunetti leafed back through the papers to check the dates and saw that, though the apartment had been purchased after Morandi’s retirement, Signora Sartori continued working at the hospital. It was unlikely that people holding such jobs could have managed, even jointly, to save enough to buy an apartment: given the absence of a mortgage and the low salary of the one still working, it became almost impossible. Neither Brunetti’s brief meeting with Morandi nor the contents of these papers suggested a man whose behaviour would be characterized by fiscal prudence.

Brunetti got to his feet and went over to the window, resuming his study of the two façades on view. He returned his attention to the wall, considering the report and wondering why it had caught Signorina Elettra’s attention. He knew her well enough to know that all of the information she had acquired would be in these papers: not to provide it would be – he was struck by the word that came to mind – to cheat. He waited for Vianello to conclude his contemplation and pass some observation on the papers.

While he waited, Brunetti considered the phenomenon of retirement. People in other countries, he had been told, dreamed of retirement as a chance to move to a warmer climate and start a whole new chapter: learn a language, buy a scuba outfit, take up taxidermy. How utterly alien that desire was to his own culture. The people he knew and those he had been observing all his life wanted nothing more, upon retirement, than to settle more deeply into their homes and the routines they had constructed over decades, making no change to their lives other than to excise from them the necessity of going to work each morning and perhaps to add the possibility of travelling a bit, but not often, and not too far. He knew no one who had bought a new home upon retirement or who had considered changing address.

What, then, would explain the sudden acquisition, at the conclusion of his working life, of a new apartment by Signor Morandi? Could there be some other Morandi? Was this an error on Signorina Elettra’s part. Error? What was he thinking? Brunetti put his fingers to his mouth, as if to stifle that rash word.

‘Why did he buy an apartment?’ Vianello asked from his side of the room.

‘What did he buy it with?’ Brunetti asked. ‘There’s no mention of a mortgage.’

Vianello returned to his chair, leaned forward to place his palm on the papers, saying, ‘Nothing in here suggests a man who saved all his life to buy a home.’

Brunetti dialled Signorina Elettra’s number.

‘Sì, Commissario?’ she answered.

‘The Inspector and I are curious about how Signor Morandi managed to buy his apartment,’ he said.

She allowed a moment to pass and then asked, ‘Did you see the date of purchase?’

Brunetti raised his shoulder and propped the phone against his ear then used both hands to leaf through the papers. He found the date and said, ‘It’s three months after he retired. But I don’t see why it’s significant.’

‘Perhaps if you looked at the date of Madame Reynard’s death,’ she suggested.

He found the copy of her death certificate and saw that Morandi had bought the apartment exactly one month after her death. He made a noise.

When no comment or question followed, she asked, ‘Did you see the name of the person selling the apartment?’

He looked. He said, ‘Matilda Querini.’ He caught Vianello’s confused glance and switched on the speaker, then replaced the receiver.

Again, he did not comment. ‘You and the Inspector don’t remember the case, then?’ she asked.

‘I remember that those people witnessed it and that Cuccetti inherited the lot.’

‘Ah,’ she said, drawing the syllable out and letting it end on a dying fall.

‘Tell me,’ Brunetti said.

‘Matilda Querini was his wife.’

‘Ah, his wife,’ Brunetti let himself say in conscious imitation. Then, a few heartbeats later, he asked, ‘Is she still alive?’

‘No. She died six years ago.’

‘Wealthy?’

‘Money without limit.’

‘And where did it go? The son was the only child, wasn’t he?’

‘Rumour has it that she left it to the Church.’

‘Only rumour, Signorina?’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Fact. She left it to the Church.’ Before he could ask, she explained, ‘I have a friend who works in the Patriarch’s office. I called and asked him, and he told me it was the biggest sum they’ve ever been left.’

‘Did he say how much?’

‘I thought it impolite to ask.’ Vianello made a small moaning noise.

‘So?’ he asked, knowing she’d be unable to leave something like that alone.

‘So I asked my father. Her money wasn’t at his bank, but he knows the director of the one where it was, and he asked him.’

‘Do I want to know?’

‘Seven million euros, give or take a few hundred thousand. And the patent for that process, and at least eight apartments.’

‘To the Church?’ Brunetti asked, at the sound of which question Vianello put his head, rather melodramatically, in his hands and shook it violently from side to side.

‘Yes,’ she answered.

An idea came to him and he asked, ‘Have you looked at Cuccetti and his wife’s bank accounts?’ For her to do so was for her to break the law. For him to know that she had done so and then do nothing was for him to break the law.

‘Of course,’ she answered.

‘Let me guess,’ Brunetti said, unable to resist the temptation to show off a little, ‘there was no money put into either account after the sale?’

‘Nothing,’ she answered. ‘Of course, she may have given Morandi the apartment from the goodness of her heart,’ she said, her tone excluding this possibility a priori.

‘Cuccetti’s reputation makes that unlikely, wouldn’t you say?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, then added, ‘But it also makes his wife’s decision to leave it all to the Church…’ she began and then paused to search for the suitable word.

‘Grotesque?’ Brunetti suggested.

‘Ah,’ she said in appreciation of the justness of his choice.