A Noble Radiance (26 page)

Surprised at himself
for never having asked the history of the family, having allowed his vague
sense that they were wealthy to suffice, Brunetti asked, 'Did you know him, as
well?'

'No, not until later,
after they were married’

'But I thought the
Lorenzonis were well known’

The Count sighed.

'What?' Brunetti
asked.

'It was Ludovico's
father who gave the Jews to the Germans’ "Yes, I know’

'Everyone knew it,
but there was no proof, so nothing happened to him after the war. But none of
us would speak to him. Even his brothers wouldn't have anything to do with him’

'And Ludovico?'
Brunetti asked.

'He spent the war in
Switzerland, with relatives. He was just a baby then.'

'And after the war?'

'His father didn't
live long. Ludovico didn't see him, didn't come back to Venice until after he
was dead. There wasn't much to inherit, the title and the
palazzo,
but
nothing else. He came back and made peace with his uncles and aunts. Even then,
it seemed like all he could think about was making the name so famous that
everyone would forget about his father’

'It seems he's
succeeded,' Brunetti remarked.

'Yes, he has.'
Brunetti knew enough about his father-in-law's interests to know that many of
them overlapped, perhaps competed with those of the Lorenzoni family, and so he
accepted the Count's assessment of the other man.

'And now?' Brunetti
asked."

'And now? And now all
he has is a nephew.' Brunetti sensed them to be on very uncertain ground here.
Count Orazio himself had no son to carry on the name, not even a nephew to
carry on the family businesses. He had, instead, one daughter, and she was
married, not to a man of rank as exalted as her own, but to a policeman who
seemed destined never to rise above the rank of
commissario.
The
same war that had led Ludovico's father to commit crimes against humanity had
made Brunetti's father the captain of a regiment of infantry who had gone off
to Russia in their paper-soled boots to fight against the enemies of Italy.
Instead, they had fought a losing battle against the Russian winter, and those
few who survived, Brunetti's father among them, had then disappeared for years
into Stalin's gulags. The grey-haired man who walked back to Venice in 1949 was
still a captain and lived out his remaining years with a captain's pension, but
crimes had been done against his spirit, and Brunetti, as a boy, seldom saw in
his father evidence of the playful, joyous young man his mother had married.

Shaking himself free
of the grip of memory and of his involvement with the Lorenzonis, Brunetti
said, I've tried to speak to Paola.'

'Tried?'

'It’s not easy.'

'To tell someone you
love them?' Astonished that the Count would say something so close to passion,
Brunetti said nothing. 'Guido?'

‘Yes?' Brunetti
braced himself for a long reproach from the Count, but instead he listened to a
silence as long as his own had been.

‘I understand. I
didn't mean to snap.' The Count said nothing more, but Brunetti chose to
interpret it as an apology. For twenty years, he and the Count had dodged
around the fact that, though marriage had made them relatives, it had failed to
make them friends, and yet here was the Count, seeming to offer him just that.

Another silence
blossomed. Finally the Count ended it. 'Be careful with these people, Guido.'

'The Lorenzonis?'

'No. With whoever
kidnapped that boy. There was no harm in him. And Lorenzoni could have given
them the money. That was something else I was told.'

‘What?'

'A friend of mine
said that he'd heard a rumour that someone had offered to lend it to the
Count.' 'All of it?'

'Yes, as much as he
needed. There would have been considerable interest, of course. But the offer
was made.'

‘Who?'

‘It doesn't matter.'
Do you believe it?'

‘Yes, it's true. But
they still killed him. Lorenzoni could have got the money to them somehow; there's
little doubt of that. But they killed him even before he had a chance to get it
to them.'

'How would he have
done it? There was police surveillance.' The file on the kidnapping had shown
how closely the Lorenzonis and their assets had been watched.

'People are kidnapped
all the time, Guido, and the ransoms are paid without the police ever being
informed. It's not a difficult thing to arrange.'

Brunetti knew this
was true. 'Did he, or whoever was going to lend him the money, hear from the
kidnappers?'

'No. Nothing happened
after the second note, so he never had to borrow it.'

The file had told
Brunetti that the police had been completely at a loss about the crime. No
leads, no rumours among their informers; the boy had been snatched into the
void, and all trace of him had been lost until what remained of him turned up
in a ditch.

That's why I tell you
to be careful, Guido. If they'd kill him, even knowing that they could easily
have had the money, then they're dangerous people.'

‘I’ll be careful’
Brunetti said, struck by how often he had said the same thing to this man's
daughter.

'And thank you’

'It's nothing. I’ll
call you if I hear anything else.' With that, the Count hung up. Why kidnap
someone and not collect the ransom? wondered Brunetti. The descriptions of
Roberto's state of health in the weeks before his kidnapping hardly suggested
that he could offer resistance or try to escape his kidnappers. So they had
someone who would have been easy to keep captive. And yet they had killed him.

And the money.
Despite the efforts of the government, it had been readily available to the
Count, a man who certainly was clever and well connected enough to have found a
way to get the money to the kidnappers.

And yet there had
been no third note. Brunetti poked around in the pile of papers on his desk
until he found the original report made by the Belluno police. He read the
opening paragraphs again. The body, it stated, had been covered in parts by
only a few centimetres of earth, one of the reasons there had been such
extensive 'animal damage'. He turned to the back and opened the envelope that
contained the many photos taken of the body. He pulled out those of the
original site and spread them on his desk.

Yes, the bones were
right there, close to the surface. In some of the photos, he could see what
appeared to be fragments sticking up through the grass beside the furrow, in
the part of the field that had not been ploughed. Roberto's burial had been a
hasty and careless thing, as if his killers didn't care if the body was
discovered.

And the ring. The
ring. Perhaps, like his girlfriend, Roberto had attempted to hide it in the
beginning, when he still might have thought it was only a robbery shoved it
into his pocket and forgotten about it, like so much about Roberto's disappearance
and death, there was no way to know what had happened.

Brunetti's
reflections were interrupted by Vianello, who burst into his office, panting
heavily at having run up the stairs from the floor below.

'What is it?'

'Lorenzoni,' the sergeant
gasped. 'What?'

‘He's killed his
nephew.'

22

Vianello seemed
undone by the news. He could barely speak for a few moments and leant an arm
against the doorway, head hanging down while he pulled in deep breaths.
Finally, when he had his breathing under control, Vianello went on, 'The call
just came in’

'Who called?'

'He did. Lorenzoni’

'What happened?'

'I don't know. He
spoke to Orsoni, told him the boy attacked him and that there'd been a fight.'

'Anything else?'
Brunetti asked, moving past Vianello out into the corridor. Together they
headed for the front door and the police launches. Brunetti raised an arm to
get the attention of the guard. 'Where's Bonsuan?' he shouted. Heads turned at
the urgency of his voice.

'Outside, sir.'

‘I called him,'
Vianello said, coming up behind.

Tell me the rest,'
said Brunetti, pushing open the heavy glass door.

With a nod to
Bonsuan, Brunetti leaped on to the waiting launch and turned to pull Vianello
on to the already-moving boat.

'What else?' Brunetti
demanded.

'Nothing. That’ s all
he said.'

'How did he attack
him? With what?' Brunetti raised his voice over the roar of the boat’s accelerating
motor.

‘I don't know, sir.'

'Didn't Orsoni ask?'
Brunetti asked, directing his anger towards Vianello.

'He said he hung up.
Just gave that message and hung up.'

Brunetti banged the
open palm of his hand against the railing of the boat, and as if spurred by the
blow, the boat soared out into the open waters of the Bacino, cutting across
the wake of a taxi, slamming down with a jarring thump. Bonsuan hit the siren,
and its dual-toned cry preceded them up the Grand Canal until they pulled in at
the private dock of the Lorenzoni
palazzo.

The water gate was
open, but no one was there to greet them. Vianello was off the boat first, but
his foot missed the top step and fell back onto the one below it, stepping into
water that came above his ankle. He barely noticed, turned and half-pulled,
half-held Brunetti as he made the longer jump to the higher step. Together they
ran into the dark entrance hall and through an open door on the right that led
to a lighted stairway. At the top stood the maid who had let Brunetti in the
last time. Her face was white, and she kept her arms clasped around herself, as
though she'd taken a hard blow to the stomach.

'Where is he?'
Brunetti asked.

She pulled one arm
loose and pointed to another staircase at the end of the hall. She gestured
once, twice, with her extended hand.

The two men made
towards the stairs and quickly went up them. At the first landing, they paused,
listening, but they heard nothing, and so they continued up the next flight. As
they approached the top, a slight sound, that of a single male voice, grew
faintly audible. It came from an open door on their left.

Brunetti went
directly into the room. Count Lorenzoni sat beside his wife, holding one of her
hands in both of his, speaking softly to her. Anyone viewing the scene would
believe that it spoke of domesticity and order: an elderly man sat in soft
conversation with his wife, her hand held gently within his own. That is, until
they glanced down and saw that the lower half of the man's trousers, and his
shoes, were bathed in blood and that smatterings of it spotted his hands and
cuffs.

'Gesu bambino’
Vianello whispered.

The Count glanced up
at them, then back to his wife. 'Don't worry, dear, everything's all right now.
I'm all right. Nothing's happened.'

As Brunetti watched,
the Count released her hand, and Brunetti could hear a faint sucking sound as
his blood-flecked hands pulled loose from hers. The Count got to his feet and
moved away from her. Brunetti saw no sign that his wife realized that he had
spoken to her or that he had left her.

'This way’ the Count
said and led them from the room, back towards the steps, and down to the floor
beneath. He went down the corridor, towards the room in which Brunetti had
twice spoken to him. The Count pushed open the door but made no move to enter
the room. He said nothing but shook his head when Brunetti gestured him into
the room.

Brunetti stepped
inside, closely followed by Vianello. What he saw made him understand the
Count's refusal. The worst was the top of the curtains in front of the far
window, which had absorbed whatever remained of the force of the pellets from
the shot. They had also absorbed the bulk of the brain matter and blood that
had exploded from Maurizio's head. The young man's body lay crumpled at the
foot of the curtains, pulled, or collapsed, into a foetal position. Maurizio's
face had escaped the force of the shot; the back of his head was gone. The
barrel must have been just below his chin when the shot was fired. Brunetti saw
this much before he turned away.