The Bellini Card

30

What would I tell you?” She stood by the window, where only the night before she had sat with the dottore, speaking of stone lions. “To me, Commissario, this is my house. These are my friends.”

Brunelli felt the heat flush in his cheeks.

“I might point out that one of your friends has been killed,” he growled.

His eye fell on a monstrous display of barbaric weaponry above the fireplace. Pikes, cutlasses, sabers-all of it, no doubt, stripped from the corpses of fallen Turks on some godforsaken battlefield far away. It was unlikely, he thought, that whichever scion of the house of Aspi had fought that day had killed them personally. That would have been a job for the ordinary men, the common soldiers, the Venetians who fought and who went down unrecorded.

“What you think of me, or the work I do, is of no consequence,” he added. “I hear the same from my son.”

The contessa flung him a glance of contempt. “Even your son.”

“My son is young. He does not, I think, understand what death means. He does not understand about justice.”

The contessa said nothing, merely wrapped her arms tighter about her body and stared through the window.

“Justice,” he repeated heavily. Brunelli could guess what she was thinking. They were all the same, weren’t they, these aristocrats? Supposing that the law was for little people, people like himself. Still dreaming of the days when they controlled the Republic-except that they gave it up, too, at the first shot. “I believe the count himself would have wanted that much.”

The contessa put the heel of her hand to her mouth. Brunelli saw her shoulders heave. After a while she wiped her eyes with her fingers. “The gondolier, Commissario?”

“Mostly bruised. Remembers nothing,” Brunelli said brusquely. “Were your doors locked?”

There was a pause. Eventually the contessa said, “It was not necessary. Antonio was downstairs to receive my guests.”

“And to bring them upstairs?”

“Yes.”

Anyone, the commissario thought, could have come in the street door and walked through to the jetty, while the footman showed the guests upstairs.

“The count-he was the first to leave?”

“He went early. He said he had something to do.”

“Do you know what?”

“No. I–I accused him of being mysterious.” The contessa’s voice was flat.

“What time do you think he left?”

“The time? What does it matter, Commissario? Nine, ten o’clock. We were about to play cards.” She tilted her chin. “Why don’t you say half past nine? Make it precise. Your superiors will like that.”

Brunelli ignored her. “You expected the count to play?”

“Of course.”

Brunelli paused. “The stakes-were they high or low?” Venice had invented the casino: it went without saying that nobody played for match-sticks.

“You would probably call them high. A thousand lire, something like that.”

Brunelli nodded. He had expected higher. “Which Count Barbieri could afford?”

She gave a brittle laugh. “He didn’t run from the tables, Commissario.”

There was a knock on the door. “Avanti!”

Scorlotti, Brunelli’s assistant, entered the room hesitantly. He saw the contessa and bowed.

“Something to report, Commissario.”

Brunelli took Scorlotti aside and they spoke together in low voices.

“That’s all, Scorlotti. Thank you.” When the policeman had gone, he turned again to the contessa.

“I think that’s everything for the moment.”

“For the moment?”

“Unless there’s anything else you wish to tell me now. About Barbieri, perhaps.” He paused. “Or anything-I don’t know, unusual about last night?”

Something, he thought, changed momentarily in the contessa’s expression.

He waited, patient as a cat at a mousehole.

“I–I can’t think of anything,” she admitted.

He sensed her reluctance. “It might be anything-even trivial. A remark? A guest who didn’t show up as usual?”

“No. Not quite that,” she said slowly. She put up a hand and began to twine one of her curls around her finger. “An American. He wasn’t feeling very well, I think.”

“He lost at cards?”

“No, no. He left long before-” Her eyes widened. “He left before the count.”

Brunelli was silent for a while. “And the American’s name, Contessa?”

But he knew the answer to his question already.