A Noble Radiance (4 page)

Brunetti's nod served
as both assent and thanks. When Vianello was gone, Brunetti pulled out the
phone book from his lower drawer and flipped it open to the
L’s.
He
found three listings for Lorenzoni, all at the same San Marco address:
'Ludovico,
avoocato',
'Maurizio,
ingeniere',
and 'Cornelia', no profession
listed.

His hand reached out
for the phone, but instead of lifting it, he got up from his desk and went down
to speak to Signorina Elettra.

When he went into the
small antechamber outside the office of his superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe
Patta, the secretary was talking on the phone. Seeing him, she smiled and held
up one magenta-nailed finger. He approached her desk and, while she finished
her conversation, he both listened to what she said and glanced down at that
day's headlines, reading them upside down, a skill that had often proven most
useful.
L'Esule di Hammamet,
the headline declared, and Brunetti wondered why it was
that former politicians who fled the country to avoid arrest were always
'exiles' and never 'fugitives'.

‘I’ll see you then at
eight,' Signorina Elettra said, and added,
'Ciao, caro,'
before
putting down the phone.

What young man had
summoned that final, provocative laugh, and who would tonight sit across from
those dark eyes? 'A new flame?' Brunetti asked before he could consider how
bold a question it was.

However forward the
question might have been, Signorina Elettra seemed not to mind at all.
'Magari,'
she
said with tired resignation. 'If only it were. No, it’s my insurance agent. I
meet him once a year: he buys me a drink, and I give him a month's salary.'

Accustomed as he was
to the frequent excesses of her rhetoric, Brunetti still found this surprising.
'A month's?'

'Well,' she
temporized, 'very close to’

'And what is it, if
you'll permit me to ask, that you insure?'

'Not my life,
certainly,' she said with a laugh, and Brunetti, when he realized how deeply he
meant it, bit back the gallantry of saying that no compensation could possibly
be made for such a loss. 'My apartment and the things in it, my car, and since
three years ago, a private health insurance’

'Does your sister
know about that?' he asked, wondering what a doctor who worked for the national
health system would think of a sister who paid not to have to use that system.

'Who do you think it
was that told me to get it?' Elettra asked.

'Why?'

1 suppose because she
spends so much time in the hospitals, so she knows what goes on there’ She
considered this a moment and added, 'Though, from what she's told me, if s
probably more a case of what doesn't go on. Last week, one of her patients was
in a room at the Civile with six other women. Nobody bothered to give them any
food for two days, and they could never get anyone to explain why’

'What happened?'

'Luckily, four of
them had relatives who came to visit, so they divided their food among the
others. If they hadn't, they wouldn't have eaten’

Elettra's voice had
risen as she spoke; as she continued, it rose even higher. 'If you want
someone to change your sheets, you've got to pay to have them do it. Or to
bring a bed pan. Barbara's given up on it, so she's told me to go to a private
clinic if I ever have to go to the hospital.'

'And I didn't know
you had a car,' he said, always surprised to learn that someone living and
working in the city had one. He'd never owned one, nor had his wife, though
both of them could drive, badly.

1 keep it at my
cousin's in Mestre. He uses it during the week, and I get to use it on the weekends
if I want to go anywhere.'

'And the apartment?'
asked Brunetti, who had never bothered to insure his own.

‘I went to school
with a woman who had an apartment in Campo della Guerra. Remember when they had
that fire there? Her apartment was one of the ones that got burned out.'

1 thought the
comune
paid
for the restoration,' Brunetti said.

'They paid for
basic
restoration’
she corrected him. 'That didn't include trifles like her clothing or
possessions or new furniture.'

'Would insurance be
any better?' Brunetti asked, having heard countless horror stories about the
difficulty of getting money out of an insurance company, regardless of how
legitimate the claim.

'I'd rather try with
a private company than with the city’

'Who wouldn't?'
Brunetti asked in tired resignation.

'But what can I do
for you, Commissario?' she asked, waving away their conversation and, with it,
the thought of loss and pain.

'I'd like you to go
down to the archives and see if you can get me the file on the Lorenzoni kidnapping’
Brunetti said, returning both loss and pain to the room.

'Roberto?'

'Did you know him?'

'No, but my boyfriend
at the time had a younger brother who went to school with him. The Vivaldi, I
think. It was ages ago’

'Did he ever say
anything about him?'

'I don't remember
exactly, but I think he didn't like him very much.'

'Do you remember
why?'

She tilted her chin
up at an angle and pulled her lips into a tight moue that would have subtracted
greatly from the beauty of any other woman. In Elettra's case, all it did was
show him the fine line of her jaw and emphasize the redness of her pursed lips.

'No,' she finally
said. 'Whatever it was, it’s gone’

Brunetti didn't know
how to ask the next question. 'You said your boyfriend of the time. Are you
still, er, are you still in contact with him?'

Her smile blossomed,
as much at his question as at the awkwardness of his phrasing.

'I'm the godmother of
his first son,' she said. 'So it would be very easy to call and ask him to ask
his brother what he can remember. I'll do it this evening’ She pushed herself
back from her chair. ‘I’ll go down and see about the file. Shall I bring it up
to your office?' He was grateful she didn't ask why he wanted to see it.
Superstitiously, Brunetti hoped that, by not talking about it, he could prevent
its turning out to be Roberto.

‘Yes, please,' he
said and went back up there to wait

4

A father himself,
Brunetti chose to delay calling the Lorenzoni family until the autopsy was
completed. From what Doctor Bortot had said and from the presence of the ring,
it seemed unlikely that anything he might discover during it would exclude the
possibility of its being Roberto Lorenzoni, but as long as that possibility
existed, Brunetti wanted to spare the family what might be unnecessary pain.

While he waited for
the original file on the crime, he tried to recall what he knew about it. Since
the kidnapping had taken place in the province of Treviso, the police of that
city had handled the original investigation, even though the victim was
Venetian. Brunetti had been busy with another case at the time, but he
remembered the diffused sense of frustration that had filled the Questura after
the investigation had spread to Venice and the police tried to find the men who
had kidnapped the boy.

Of all crimes,
Brunetti had always found kidnapping the most horrible, not only because he
had two children, but because of the dirt it did on humanity, placing an
entirely arbitrary price on a life and then destroying that life when the price
was not met. Or worse, as in so many cases, taking the person, accepting the
money, and then never releasing the hostage. He had been present when the body
of a twenty-seven-year-old woman had been retrieved; she had been kidnapped and
then placed in a living tomb under a metre of earth and left there to
suffocate. He still remembered her hands, grown as black as the earth above
her, clutched helplessly to her face in death.

He could not be said
to know anyone in the Lorenzoni family, though he and Paola had once been at a
formal dinner party where Count Ludovico had also been present. As is always
the case in Venice, he occasionally saw the older man on the street, but they
had never spoken. The
commissario
who had handled the Venetian part
of the investigation had been transferred to Milan a year ago, so Brunetti
could not ask him face to face about the way things had been handled or about
his impression of events. Often that sort of personal, unrecorded response
proved useful, especially when a case came to be reconsidered. Brunetti
accepted the possibility, since the body found in the field might prove not to
be that of the Lorenzoni boy, that the case would not be reopened and the body
would prove to be a matter for the Belluno police. But then how explain the
ring?

Signorina Elettra was
at his door before he could answer his own question. ‘Please come in’ he
called. 'You found it very quickly.' Such had not always been the case with the
Questura files, not until her blessed arrival. 'How long have you been with us
now, Signorina?' he asked.

'It will be three
years this summer, Commissario. Why do you ask?'

It was on his lips to
say, 'So that I might better count my joys,' but that sounded to him too much
like one of her own rhetorical flights. Instead, he answered, 'So I can order
flowers to celebrate the day’

She laughed at this
and they both remembered his original shock when he learned that one of her
first actions upon taking the position as Vice-Questore Patta's secretary had
been to order a bi-weekly delivery of flowers, often quite spectacular flowers,
and never fewer than a dozen. Patta, who was concerned only that his expense
allotment from the city extend to his frequent lunches - usually quite as
spectacular as the flowers - never thought to question the expense, and so her
antechamber had become a source of pleasure to the entire Questura. It was
impossible to tell if the staff's delight resulted from what Signorina Elettra
decided to wear that day, the flowers in the small room, or from the fact that
the government was paying for them. Brunetti, who took equal delight in all
three, found a line, he thought from Petrarch, running through his memory,
where the poet blessed the month, the day, and the hour when he first saw his
Laura. Saying nothing about any of this, he took the file and placed it on the
desk in front of him.

He opened the file
when she left and began to read. Brunetti had remembered only that it happened
in the autumn; September 28th, sometime before midnight on a Tuesday. Roberto's
girlfriend had stopped her car (there followed the year, make, and licence
number) in front of the gates of the Lorenzbni family villa, rolled down the
window, and punched the numerical code into the digital lock that controlled
them. When the gates failed to open, Roberto got out of the car and walked over
to see what was wrong. A large stone lay just inside the gates, and its weight
prevented them from opening.

Roberto, the girl
said in the original police report, bent to try to move the rock, and when he
was stooped down, two men emerged from the bushes beside him. One put a pistol
to the boy's head, while the other came and stood just outside her window,
pointing his pistol at her. Both wore ski masks.

She said that, at
first, she thought it was a robbery, and so she put her hands in her lap and
tried to remove the emerald ring she was wearing, hoping to drop it to the
floor of the car, safe from the thieves. The car radio was playing, so she
couldn't hear what the men said, but she told the police she realized it wasn't
a robbery when she saw Roberto turn and walk into the bushes in front of the
first man.

The second man
remained where he was, outside her window, pointing his gun at her but making
no attempt to speak to her for another few moments, and then he backed into the
bushes and disappeared.

The first thing she
did was to lock the door of the car. She reached between the seats of the car
for her
telefonino,
but its batteries had run down, and it was useless. She
waited to see if Roberto would come back. When he didn't - she didn't know how
long she waited - she backed away from the gate, turned, and drove towards
Treviso until she came to a phone booth at the side of the highway. She dialled
113 and reported what had happened. Even then, she said, it didn't occur to her
that it could be a kidnapping; she had even thought it might be a joke of some
sort.