A Noble Radiance (5 page)

Brunetti read through
the rest of the report, looking to see if the officer who spoke to her had
asked why she would think such a thing could be a joke, but the question didn't
appear. Brunetti opened a drawer and looked for a piece of paper; finding none,
he leaned down and pulled an envelope from his wastepaper basket, turned it
over and made a note on the back, then went back to the report.

The police contacted
the family, knowing no more than that the boy had been taken away at gunpoint.
Count Ludovico arrived at the villa at four that morning, driven there by his
nephew, Maurizio. The police were, by then, treating it as a probable
kidnapping, so the mechanism to block all the family funds had been put into
motion. This could be done only with those funds in the country, and the family
still had access to their holdings in foreign banks. Knowing this, the
commissario
from
the Treviso police who was heading the investigation attempted to impress upon
Count Ludovico the futility of giving in to ransom demands. Only by blocking
any attempt to give the kidnappers what they demanded could they be dissuaded
from future crimes. Most times, he told the Count, the person was never
returned, often never found.

Count Ludovico
insisted that there was no reason to believe that this was a kidnapping. It
could be a robbery, a prank, a case of mistaken identity. Brunetti was well
familiar with the need to deny the horrible and had often dealt with people who
could not be made to believe that a member of their family was endangered or,
often, dead. So the Count's insistence that it was not, could not be, a
kidnapping was entirely understandable. But Brunetti wondered, again, at the
suggestion that it could be some sort of prank. What sort of young man was
Roberto that the people who knew him best would assume this?

That it was not was
proven two days later, when the first note arrived. Sent express from the
central post office in Venice, probably dropped into one of the slots outside
the building, it demanded seven billion lire, though it did not say how the
payment was to be arranged.

By then the story was
splashed all over the front pages of the national newspapers, so there could
have been no doubt on the kidnappers' part that the police were involved. The
second note, sent from Mestre a day later, dropped the ransom to five billion
and said that the information about how and when to pay it would be phoned to a
friend of the family, though no one was named. It was upon receipt of this note
that Count Ludovico made his televised appeal to the kidnappers to release his
son. The text of the message was attached to the report. He explained that there
was no way he could raise the money, all of his assets having been frozen. He
did say that, if the kidnappers would still contact the person they intended
calling and tell him what to do, he would gladly exchange places with his son:
he would obey any command they gave. Brunetti made a note on the envelope,
telling himself to see if he could get a tape of the Count's appearance.

Appended was a list
of the names and addresses of everyone questioned in connection with the case,
the reason the police had questioned them, and their relationship to the
Lorenzonis. Separate pages held transcripts or summaries of these
conversations.

Brunetti let his eye
run down the list. He recognized the names of at least a half dozen known
criminals, but he was unable to see any common thread connecting them. One was
a burglar, another a car thief, and a third, Brunetti knew, having put him
there, was in prison for bank robbery. Perhaps these were some of the people
the Treviso police used as informers. All led nowhere.

Some other names he
recognized, not because of their criminality, but because of their social position.
There was the parish priest of the Lorenzoni family, the director of the bank
where most of their funds were held, and the names of the family lawyer and notary.

Doggedly, he read
through every word in the file; he studied the block printing on the
plastic-covered ransom notes and the lab report that accompanied them, saying
that there were no fingerprints and that the paper was too widely sold to be
traceable; he examined the photos of the opened gate to the villa taken both
from a distance and close up. This last included a photo of the rock that had
blocked the gate. Brunetti saw that it was so large that it could not have
fitted through the bars of the gate: whoever had put it there would have to
have done so from inside. Brunetti made another note.

The last papers
contained in the file had to do with the finances of the Lorenzonis and
included a list of their holdings in Italy, as well as others they were known
to possess in foreign countries. The Italian companies were more or less
familiar to Brunetti, as they were to every Italian. To say 'steel' or 'cotton'
was pretty much to pronounce the family name. The foreign holdings were more
diverse: the Lorenzonis owned a Turkish trucking company, beet processing
plants in Poland, a chain of luxury beach hotels in the Crimea, and a cement
factory in the Ukraine. Like so many businesses in Western Europe, the
interests of the Lorenzoni family were expanding beyond the confines of the
continent, many of them following the path of victorious capitalism towards
the East.

It took him more than
an hour to read through the file, and when he finished, he took it down to
Signorina Elettra's office. 'Could you make me a copy of everything here?' he
asked as he placed it on her desk.

'The photos, too?'

'Yes, if you can.'

'Has he been found,
the Lorenzoni boy?'

'Someone has,'
Brunetti answered but then, conscious of this minor evasion, added, ‘It's
probably him.'

She pulled in her
lips and raised her eyebrows, then shook her head and said, 'Poor boy. Poor
parents.' Neither of them said anything for a moment, and then she asked, ‘Did
you see him when he appeared on television, the Count?'

'No, I didn't.' He
couldn't remember why, but he knew he hadn't seen it.

'He was wearing full
make-up, the way the newscasters do. I know about that sort of thing. I
remember thinking at the time that it was a strange thing for a man to be made
to do especially in those circumstances.'

'How did he seem to
you?' Brunetti asked.

She thought about
this for a moment .and then answered, 'He seemed without hope, absolutely
certain that, whatever he begged or pleaded, it wasn't going to be given to
him.'

'Despair?' Brunetti
asked.

‘You'd think that,
wouldn't you?' She looked away from him and paused again. Finally she answered,
'No, not despair. A sort of tired resignation, as if he knew what was going to
happen and knew he couldn't do anything to stop it.' She looked back at Brunetti
and gave a combination smile and shrug. I'm sorry I can't explain it better
than that. Perhaps if you looked at it yourself, you'd see what I mean.'

'How could I get a
copy?' he asked.

1 suppose RAI must
have it in their files. I'll call someone I know in Rome and see if I can get a
copy.'

'Someone you know?'
Brunetti sometimes wondered if there were a man in Italy between the ages of
twenty-one and fifty that Signorina Elettra didn't know.

'Well, really someone
Barbara knows, an old boyfriend of hers. He works in the news department in
RAI. They graduated together’

'Then he's a doctor?'

'Well, he has a
degree in medicine, though I don't think he's ever practised. His father works
for RAI, so he was offered a job as soon as he got out of university. Because
they can say he's a doctor, they use him to answer medical questions that come
up -you know the sort of thing they do: when they have a programme about
dieting or sunburn and they want to be sure that what they tell people is true,
they set Cesare to doing the research. Sometimes he even gets interviewed,
Dottor Cesare Bellini, and he tells people what the latest medical wisdom is.'

'How many years did
he spend in medical school?'

'Seven, I think, just
like Barbara.'

'To be interviewed
about sunburn?'

Again the smile
appeared, just as quickly to be shrugged away. "There are too many doctors
already; he was lucky to get the job. And he likes living in Rome.'

'Well, then, call him
if you would.'

'Certainly, Dottore,
and I’ll bring you the copies of the report as soon as I make them.'

He saw thatthere was
still something she wanted to say. 'Yes?'

'If you are going to
reopen the investigation, would you like me to make a copy for the
Vice-Questore?'

'If s a bit early to
say we're going to reopen the investigation, so a single copy for me would suffice,'
Brunetti said in his most oblique voice.

'Yes, Dottore,' came
Signorina Elettra's non-committal answer, 'and I'll see that the originals get
back into the file’

'Good. Thank you’

'Then I’ll call
Cesare’

'Thank you,
Signorina,' Brunetti said and went back up to his office, thinking of a country
that had too many doctors but where it grew more difficult year by year to find
a carpenter or a shoemaker.

5

Though the man in
Treviso who had headed the Lorenzoni kidnapping was unknown to Brunetti, he
well remembered Gianpiero Lama, who had been in charge of that part of the
investigation handled by the Venice police. Lama, a Roman who had come to
Venice heralded by the successful arrest and subsequent conviction of a Mafia
killer, had worked in the city for only two years before being promoted to the
position of Vice-Questore and sent to Milan, where Brunetti believed him still
to be.

He and Brunetti had
worked together, but neither of them had much enjoyed the experience. Lama had
found his colleague too timid in the pursuit of crime and criminals, unwilling
to take the kind of risks which Lama believed necessary. Since Lama had also
thought it perfectly acceptable that the law sometimes be ignored, or even
bent, in order to effect an arrest, it was not uncommon that the people he
arrested were later released on some technicality discovered by the
magistratura.
But
as this usually happened some time after Lama's original handling of the case,
his behaviour was seldom viewed as the cause of the subsequent dismissal of the
charges or the overturning of a conviction. The perceived audacity of Lama's
behaviour had ignited his career, and like a flaring rocket he rose higher and
ever higher, each promotion preparing the way for the next.

Brunetti recalled
that it was Lama who had interviewed the Lorenzoni boy's girlfriend, he who
had failed to follow up either her or the father's suggestion that the
kidnapping could have been a joke. Or if he had questioned them about it, Lama
had failed to make any mention of it in his report

Brunetti pulled the
envelope towards him and began another list, this time of those people who
might help him learn more, if not about the actual kidnapping, then about the
Lorenzoni family. At the top of fiie list he automatically put the name of his
father-in-law, Count Orazio Falier. If anyone in the city would be sensitive to
the delicate spider's web where nobility, business, and enormous wealth were
interwoven, it was Count Orazio.

Signorina Elettra's
entrance distracted him momentarily from the list. ‘I called Cesare’ she said
as she placed a folder on his desk. 'He took a look in his computer and found
the date, so he says hell have no trouble in getting a copy of the tape. He’ll
send it up by courier this afternoon.' Even before he could ask how she did it,
Signorina Elettra answered. ‘It has nothing to do with me, Dottore.

He said he's corning
to Venice next month, and I think he wants to use his having spoken to me as an
excuse to get in touch with Barbara again.'

'And the courier?'
Brunetti asked.

'He said he'll put it
down against the report RAI's doing on the airport road,' she said, reminding
Brunetti of one of the most recent scandals. Billions had been paid to friends
of the government officials who had arranged the planning and construction of
the useless
autostrada
out to Venice's tiny airport. Some of them had subsequently
been convicted of fraud, but the case was now caught up in the endless appeal
process, while the ex-Minister who had made a fortune by masterminding the
whole thing continued not only to receive his state pension, rumoured to be in
excess of ten million lire a month, but was said to be off in Hong Kong,
amassing yet another fortune.