A Noble Radiance (31 page)

'How?'

'She saw me with
Maurizio.'

Brunetti thought of
the curved bird-woman, her tiny hands grasped around the handle of her cane.
The Count wanted to spare her from suffering, spare her from shame. Ah, yes.

'And the kidnapping?
Why didn't they send a third note?'

'He died,' the Count
said in a barren voice.

'Roberto? He died?'

That’s what they told
me.'

Brunetti nodded, as
if he understood this and as if he were following with sympathy the twisted
path the Count was taking him down. 'And so?' he asked.

'And so I told them
they had to shoot him, to make it look like that's what killed him.' As the
Count continued to explain all of this, Brunetti began to understand that the
man was persuaded of the inner logic of everything that had been done, of the
rightness
of
it. There was no doubt in that voice, no uncertainty.

'But why did they
bury him there, near Belluno?'

'One of them has a
small house in the woods, for the hunting season. They kept Roberto there, and
when he died, I told them to bury him up there.' The Count's face softened
momentarily. 'But I told them to bury him in a shallow grave. With his ring.'
Seeing Brunetti's confusion, he explained, 'So that he would be found, and for
his mother. She would have to know. I couldn't think of her not knowing, of
never knowing whether he was alive or dead. It would have killed her.'

'Yes,
I See’  
Brunetti
whispered, and in a lunatic way he did. 'And Maurizio?'

The Count cocked his
head to one side, perhaps recalling that other young man, dead now too. 'He
didn't know any of it. But then when it all began again, when you started
asking questions
_:
...
well, he began to ask questions about Roberto and about the kidnapping. He
wanted to go to the police and tell what had happened.' The Count shook his
head here at the young man's weakness and folly. 'But then my wife would know.
If he went to the police, she'd know what had happened, what was going on’

'And you couldn't
permit that?' Brunetti asked levelly.

'No, of course not.
It would have been too much for her’ ‘I see’

The
Count stretched out one hand towards Brunetti, the same
hand that had measured out those small balls of radium, or plutonium, or uranium.

If he had turned a
dial and adjusted the clarity of a television screen, or suddenly removed some
sort of static interference from a radio reception, the change could have been
no more apparent, for it was at this point that the Count began to lie. There
was no change in his voice as it went seamlessly from his agitation at the
thought of his wife's pain to what he next began to explain, but it was as audible
and evident to Brunetti as if the Count had suddenly jumped on the desk and
begun to tear off his clothing.

'He came to me that
night and said he understood what I'd done. He threatened me. With the shotgun’
The Count couldn't keep himself from looking over towards Brunetti to see how
he received this, but Brunetti gave no indication that he was at all aware of
what was happening.

'He came in with the
shotgun’ the Count continued. 'And he pointed it at me and told me he was
going to go to the police. I tried to reason with him, but men he came closer
and put the gun up against my face. And I think, then, that I did go a little
bit crazy because I don't remember what happened. Just that the gun went off.'

Brunetti nodded, but
what he nodded at was the correctness of his belief that anything the Count
said from now on would be a lie.

'And your client?' he
asked. 'The person who bought the materials?'

The Count's
hesitation was infinitesimal. 'Only Maurizio knew who he was. He arranged everything.'

Brunetti got to his
feet. ‘I think that’s enough, Signore. If you'd like; you can call your lawyer.
But then I'd like you to come to the Questura with me.'

The Count was visibly
surprised by this. 'Why there?'

'Because I'm
arresting you, Ludovico Lorenzoni, for the murder of your son and the murder of
your nephew.'

The confusion on the
Count's face could not have been more real. 'But I just told you. Roberto died
of natural causes. And Maurizio tried to murder me.' He pushed himself to his
feet but stayed behind his desk. He reached down, moved a paper from one side
to the other, pushed the computer keyboard a bit more to the left. But he found
nothing further to say.

'As I told you, you
can call your lawyer, but then you must come with me’

He saw the Count give
in, a change as subtle as that which marked the beginning of the lies, though
Brunetti knew that they would never stop now.

'May I say goodbye to
my wife?' he asked. 'Yes. Of course.'

Wordlessly, the Count
came around the desk, walked in front of Brunetti, and left the room.

Brunetti went over to
the window behind the desk and looked out over the rooftops. He hoped the Count
would do the honourable thing. He had let him go, uncertain about what other
guns might be in the house. The Count was trapped by his own admission, his
wife knew him to be a killer, his reputation and that of his family was soon
to be in ruins, and a weapon might be somewhere in the house. If he were an
honourable man, the Count would do the honourable thing.

Yet Brunetti knew he
would not.

27

'But what does it
matter if he's punished or not?' Paola asked him three nights later, after the
feeding frenzy of the press that had greeted the Count's arrest had quieted
down. 'His son is dead. His nephew's dead. His wife knows he killed them. His
reputation is ruined. He's an old man, and he'll die in prison.' She sat on the
side of the bed, wearing one of Brunetti's old bathrobes and a heavy woollen
sweater on top of it. 'What else do you want to happen to him?'

Brunetti was sitting
in bed, covers drawn up to his chest, and had been reading when she came into
the room, bringing him a large mug of heavily honeyed tea. She handed him the
mug, nodded to tell him that, yes, she'd thought to add cognac and lemon, and
sat down beside him.

As he took his first
sip, she pushed aside the newspapers that lay scattered on the floor beside
their bed. The Count's face looked up from page four, pushed there by a Mafia
killing in Palermo, the first in weeks. In the time that had elapsed since the
Count's arrest, Brunetti had not spoken of him, and Paola had respected his
silence. But now she wanted him to talk, not because she relished discussing a
parent who murdered a child, but because she knew from long experience that it
would help Brunetti to rid himself of the pain of the case.

She asked him what he
thought would happen to the Count, and as he answered, she took the mug from
him now and again and sipped at the hot liquid as he explained the manoeuvres
of the Count's lawyers, now three of them, and his general feeling about what
was likely to happen. It was impossible for him to disguise, especially from
Paola, his disgust at the thought that the two murders would most likely go
unpunished and the Count to jail only for the transport of illegal substances,
for he now claimed that Maurizio had masterminded the kidnapping.

Already the force of
the paid press had been called into action, and every front page in the
country, not to mention what passes for editorial comment in Italy, had carried
stories lamenting the sad fate of this nobleman, this noble man, to have been
so deceived by a person of his own blood, and what crueller fate could there be
than to have nursed this viper in the bosom of his family for more than a
decade, only to have him turn and bite, strike to the heart. And gradually,
popular feeling responded to the prevailing wind of words. The idea of traffic
in nuclear armaments faded, smothered under the weight of euphemism that
transmuted the crime into 'trafficking in illegal substances', as though those
deadly pellets, strong enough to vaporize a city, were the equivalent of say,
Iranian caviare or ivory statuettes. Roberto's temporary grave was checked by a
team of men carrying Geiger counters, but no trace of contamination was found.

The books and records
of the Lorenzoni companies had been sequestered, and a team of police
accountants and computer experts had pored over them for days, trying to trace
the shipment that would have taken the contents of the suitcase on to the
client the Count still said he couldn't identify. The only shipment they found
that seemed at all suspicious was ten thousand plastic syringes sent from
Venice to Istanbul by ship two weeks before Roberto's disappearance. The
Turkish police sent back word that the company in Istanbul had records which
showed that the syringes had been sent on by truck to Tehran, where the trail
ended.

'He did it,' Brunetti
insisted, his voice and his feelings no less fierce than they had been days
ago, when he'd taken the Count to the Questura. Even then, at the very
beginning, he'd been outmanoeuvred, for the Count had insisted that a police
launch be sent for him: Lorenzonis do not walk, not even to prison. When
Brunetti had refused, the Count had called a water taxi, and he and the
policeman who arrested him arrived at the Questura a half hour later. There
they found the press already in place. No one ever discovered who made the call.

From the very
beginning, the whole affair had been presented to appeal to pity, replete with
the sort of vacuous sentimentality Brunetti so disliked in his countrymen.
Photos had appeared, summoned up by the magician's hand of cheap emotion:
Roberto at his eighteenth birthday party, sitting with his arm around his
father's shoulder; a decades' old photo of the Countess dancing in the arms of
her husband, both of them sleek and gleaming with youth and wealth; and even
poor Maurizio managed to get his face shown, walking along the Riva degli
Schiavoni, a poignant three steps behind his cousin Roberto.

Frasetti and
Mascarini had presented themselves at the Questura two days after the Count's
arrest, accompanied there by two of Conte Lorenzoni's lawyers. Yes, it was
Maurizio who had hired them, Maurizio who had planned the kidnapping and told
them what to do. They insisted that Roberto had died of natural causes; it was
Maurizio who had ordered them to shoot his dead cousin and thus disguise the
cause of death. And they had both insisted that they be given complete medical
exams to determine if they had suffered contamination during their time with
their victim. The tests were negative.

'He did it,' Brunetti
repeated, taking the mug back and finishing the tea. He turned to the side and
reached out to place it on the table beside the bed, but Paola took it from him
and cradled the still-warm mug in her hands.

'And he'll go to
jail,' Paola said.

'I don't care about
that,'. Brunetti said.

Then what do you care
about?'

Brunetti sank lower
on the bed, hiked the covers up closer to his chin. 'Would you laugh if I said
I cared about the truth?' he asked.

She shook her head.
'No, of course not. But does it matter?'

He slipped one hand
out from under the covers, took the mug from her and placed it on the table,
then took her hands in his. 'It matters to me, I think.'

'Why?' she asked,
though she probably knew.

'Because I hate to
see people like this, people like him, going through life and never having to
pay for what they do.'

'Don't you think the
death of his son and his nephew is enough?'

‘Paola, he sent the
men to kill the boy, to kidnap him and then kill him. And he killed his nephew
in cold blood.'

'You don't know
that,' she answered.

He shook his head. 'I
can't prove it, and I'll never be able to prove it. But I know it as well as if
I had been there.' Paola said nothing to this, and their conversation stopped
for a minute or so.

Finally Brunetti
said, "The boy was going to die. But think of what happened to him before
that, the terror, the uncertainty about what was going to happen to him. That’s
what I'll never forgive him.'

It's not your place
to forgive, is it, Guido?' she asked, but her voice was kind.