A Noble Radiance (8 page)

'What else can he
say?' the woman asked.

'I don't know,
Signora. That's all I've ever heard it say.'

'Wonderful, isn't
it?' she asked, and when he looked at her smile of simple delight, he saw that
the years had dropped away from her.

'Yes, wonderful,' he
said, and left her there in front of the store, saying
'Ciao, ciao, ciao',
to
the bird.

He cut through to
Santi Apostoli and up Strada Nuova as far as San Marcuola, where he took the
traghetto
across
the Grand Canal. The reflection from the water was so intense that Brunetti
wished he had his sunglasses, but who, that foggy, damp morning of early
spring, would have thought such splendour had been in store for the city?

On the other side, he
cut to the right, then to the left, and then back to the right, following unconscious
instructions that were programmed into him during decades of walking the city
streets to visit friends, take girls home, get a coffee, or to do any of those
thousand things a young man did without any conscious thought of destination or
route. Soon he came out in Campo San Zan Degola. To the best of Brunetti's
knowledge, no one knew whether it was the decapitated body of San Giovanni or
his missing head which was venerated in the church. It seemed to him to make
little difference.

The Salviati she had
married was the son of Fulvio, the notary, so Brunetti knew the house had to be
down the second
calle
on the right, third house on the left. And so it proved:
the number was the same as the one in the phone book, though three different
Salviatis lived here. The bottom bell had the initial E, and so Brunetti rang
it, wondering if they got to move to the higher floors of the building as the
older members of the family died and left the apartments vacant.

The door snapped open
and he went in. In front of him was a narrow walkway, leading across a
courtyard to a flight of steps. Cheerful-looking tulips lined the walkway on
both sides, and a brave magnolia was just coming into blossom in the centre of
the grass to the left of the path.

He walked up the
steps and, as he reached the door at the top, he heard the lock release. On the
other side were more steps, these leading to a landing on which stood two
doors.

At the top, the door
on the left opened and a young woman came out to the landing. 'Are you the
policeman?' she asked. 'I've forgotten your name.'

'Brunetti’ he said as
he walked up the remaining steps towards her. She stood in front of the door,
no expression whatsoever on what would otherwise have been a very pretty face.
If the baby was indeed hers, and if it was as young as his information suggested,
then she had lost no time in getting back her trim young body, which was
dressed in a tight red skirt and an even tighter black sweater. Her bland face
was surrounded by a cloud of curly black hair that fell to her shoulders, and
she looked at him with surprising lack of interest.

When he reached the
top of the steps," he said, 'Thank you for agreeing to talk to me,
Signora.'

She didn't bother to
answer this or to acknowledge that he had spoken, but turned to lead him back
into the apartment, ignoring his muttered,
'Permesso.'

'We can go in here,'
she said over her shoulder, leading him into a large living room on the left.
On the walls Brunetti saw etchings depicting scenes of such violence that they
had to be Goyas. Three windows looked down on an enclosed space which he
assumed was the narrow courtyard he had come through; the enclosing wall was
uncomfortably close. She sat down in the centre of a low sofa and crossed her
legs, exposing more thigh than Brunetti was accustomed to see displayed by
young mothers. Waving to a chair that stood opposite her, she asked, 'What is
it you'd like to know?'

Brunetti tried to
assess the emotion that was emanating from her and knew that his instincts
sought nervousness. But he found nothing other than irritation.

‘I’d like you to tell
me how long you knew Roberto Lorenzoni’

She pushed at a lock
of hair with the back of her hand, probably unconscious of how impatient the
gesture made her seem. 1 told all that to the other policeman’

‘I know that,
Signora. I've read the report, but I'd like you to tell me in your own words.'

‘I’d like to think
it's my own words that are in the report,' she said curtly.

‘I’m sure they are.
But I'd like to hear for myself what you have to say about him. It might give
me a better understanding of what sort of man he was’

'Have you found the
people who took him?' she asked with the first sign of real curiosity she had
displayed since he arrived.

'No.'

She seemed
disappointed at this but said nothing.

'Could you tell me
how long you knew him?'

1 went out with him
for a year or so. Before it happened, that is.'

'And what sort of
person was he?'

'What do you mean,
"What sort of person was he?" He was someone I went to school with.
We had things in common, liked to do the same things. He made me laugh.'

'Is that why you
thought it might be a joke, the kidnapping?'

'Why I what?’ she
asked with real confusion..

'It says in the
original report’ Brunetti explained, 'that you first thought it might be a
joke. When it happened, that is.'

She looked away from
Brunetti, as if listening to music played so softly in another room that only
she could hear it. 'I said that?'

Brunetti nodded.

After a long pause,
she said, 'Well, I suppose I could have. Roberto had some very strange
friends.'

'What sort of
friends?'

'Oh, you know,
students from the university.'

‘I’m not sure I
understand why they would be strange,' Brunetti said.

'Well, none of them
worked, but they all had a lot of money.' As if she knew how weak this sounded,
she continued, 'No, that's not it. They said strange things, about how they
could do anything they wanted to in life or with their lives. Things like that.
The sort of things students say.' Seeing the look of polite expectation on
Brunetti's face, she added, 'And they were very interested in fear.'

'Fear?'

'Yes, they read those
horror books, and they were always going to see movies that had lots of
violence and things like that in them.'

Brunetti nodded and
made a non-committal noise.

'In fact, that was
one of the reasons I had pretty much decided to stop seeing Roberto. But men it
happened, and I didn't have to tell him.' Was that relief he heard in her
voice?

The door opened, and
a middle-aged woman came into the room, carrying a baby which had its mouth
open, poised to scream. When she saw Brunetti, the woman stopped, and sensing
her motion, the baby closed its mouth and turned to look at the source of the
woman's surprise. Brunetti stood.

"This is the
policeman.
Mamma’
the young woman said, paying no attention at all to the
baby, and then asked, 'Did you want something?'

'No, no, Francesca.
But it’s time for the feeding.'

It'll have to wait,
won't it?' the girl answered as though the idea gave her some satisfaction. She
looked at Brunetti and then back at the woman she called
Mamma.
'Not
unless you want the policeman to watch me nurse.'

The woman made an
inarticulate noise and grabbed the baby more tightly. It - Brunetti could never
tell if the tiny ones were boys or girls - continued to stare at him and then
turned towards its grandmother and gave a bubbling laugh.

‘I suppose we can
wait ten minutes,' the older woman said and turned and left the room, the
baby's laugh following behind her like the wake of a ship.

'Your mother?'
Brunetti asked, though he was doubtful about this.

'My husband's,' she
answered curtly. 'What else do you want to know about Roberto?'

'Did you, at the
time, think that some of his friends rmight have engineered this?'

Before she answered,
she brushed again at her hair. 'Will you tell me why you want to know?' she
asked. The tone of her question took years from her previous manner and
reminded Brunetti that she couldn't yet be twenty.

'Will that help you
answer the question?' he asked.

‘I don't know. But I
still know a lot of these people, and I don't want to say anything that might
..
.'.She allowed her sentence to trail off, leaving Brunetti
to wonder what sort of answer she might give.

'We've found what
might be his body,' he said and offered no further explanation.

Then it couldn't have
been a joke’ she said instantly.

Brunetti smiled and
nodded in what he wanted her to believe was agreement, not bothering to tell
her how often he had witnessed the violent consequences of what had begun as
nothing more than a joke.

She looked down at
the cuticle of her right forefinger and began to pick at it with the fingers
of her left  'Roberto always said he thought his father loved his cousin, Maurizio,
more than he did him. So he did things that would force his father to pay
attention to him.'

'Such as?'

'Oh, getting in
trouble at school, being rude to the teachers, little things. But once he had
some friends hot-wire his car and steal it. He had them do it when he was
parked in front of one of his father's offices in Mestre and he was inside,
talking to his father: that way, his father couldn't think he'd left the keys
in it or lent it to someone.'

'What happened?'

'Oh, they drove it to
Verona and left it in a parking garage there, then took the train back. It
wasn't found for months, and when it was, the insurance had to be paid back,
and the parking fees had to be paid’

'How is it that you
know about this, Signora?'

She started to
answer, paused, and then said, 'Roberto told me about it’

Brunetti resisted the
impulse to ask when he had told her. His next question was more important.

'Are these the same
friends who might have played a joke like this?'

'Like what?'

'A false
kidnapping?'  '

She looked down at
her finger again. 1 didn't say that. And if you've found his body, then there's
no question of that, is there? That it was a joke?'

Brunetti left that
alone for a moment and asked, instead, 'Could you give me their names?'

'Why?'

'I'd like to talk to
them’

For a moment, he
thought she was going to refuse, but she gave in and said, 'Carlo Pianon and
Marco Salvo.'

He remembered the
names from the original file. Because they were Roberto's best friends, the
police had wondered if they were the people the kidnappers said they would
contact to use as intermediaries. But both of them were enrolled in a language
course in England when Roberto was kidnapped.

He thanked her for
the names and added, 'You said that was one of the reasons you had decided not
to go out with him any more. Were there others?'

'Oh, there were lots
of reasons,' she answered vaguely.

Brunetti said
nothing, allowing her weak response to echo in the room. Finally she added,
'Well, he wasn't much fun any more, not the last week or so. He was tired all
the time, and he said he didn't feel well. It got so all he could talk about
was how tired he felt, and how weak. I didn't like having to listen to him
complain all the time. Or have him fall asleep in the car and things like
that.' ‘Did he go to a doctor?'

'Yes. That was right
after he started saying he couldn't smell anything any more. He always complained
about smoking - he was worse than an American about that - but then he said he
couldn't even smell smoke’ Her own nose twitched in response to the absurdity
of this. 'So he decided to go to some specialist’