Anonymous Venetian (10 page)

A second later, he looked up at
Brunetti, smiled sweetly, and said, ‘I’ve never seen him before, officer.’

‘Are you satisfied?’ the other
one asked and took a step towards the door.

Brunetti took the drawing that
Crespo held out to him and slipped it back into the folder. ‘That’s only an
artist’s guess of what he looked like, Signor Crespo. I’d like you to look at a
photograph of him, if you don’t mind.’

Brunetti smiled his most
seductive smile, and Crespo’s hand flew, with a swallow-like flutter, back to
the soft hollow between his collar bones. ‘Of course, officer. Anything you
suggest. Anything.’

Brunetti smiled and reached to
the bottom of the thin pile of photos in the folder. He took one out and
studied it for an instant. One would serve as well as the next. He looked at
Crespo, who had again closed the distance between them. ‘There is a possibility
that he was killed by a man who was paying for his services. That means men
like him might be at risk from the same person.’ He offered the photo to
Crespo.

The young man took the photo,
managing to touch Brunetti’s fingers with his own as he did so. He held it in
the air between them, gave Brunetti a long smile, and then bowed his smiling
face over the photo. His hand left his neck and slid up to cover his gasping
mouth. ‘No, no,’ he said, eyes still on the photo. ‘No, no,’ he repeated and
looked up at Brunetti with eyes gone wide with horror. He thrust the picture
away from him, jammed it into Brunetti’s chest, and backed away from him, as
though Brunetti had carried pollution into the room with him. ‘They can’t do
that to me. That won’t happen to me,’ he said, backing away from Brunetti. His
voice rose with every word, teetered on the edge of hysteria, and then fell
over into it. ‘No, that won’t happen to me. Nothing will ever happen to me.’
His voice rose up into a high-pitched challenge to the world he lived in. ‘Not
to me, not to me,’ he shouted, backing further and further away from Brunetti.
He bumped into a table in the middle of the room, panicked at finding himself
blocked in his attempt to get away from the photo and the man who had shown it
to him, and lashed out at it with his arm. A vase identical to the one near
Brunetti crashed to the floor.

The door to the other room
opened, and a fourth man came quickly into the room. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘What’s
going on?’

He looked towards Brunetti, and
they recognized one another instantly. Giancarlo Santomauro was not only one of
the best known lawyers in Venice, often serving as legal counsel to the
Patriarch at no cost, but he was also the president and moving light of the
Lega della Moralit
à
, a society of lay Christians
dedicated to the ‘preservation and perpetuation of faith, home, and virtue’.

Brunetti did no more than nod. If
by any chance these men didn’t know the identity of Crespo’s client, it was
better for the lawyer that it remain that way.

‘What are you doing here?’
Santomauro demanded angrily. He turned to the older of the two men, now
standing above Crespo, who had ended on a sofa, both hands over his face,
sobbing. ‘Can’t you shut him up?’ Santomauro shouted. Brunetti watched as the
older man bent over Crespo. He said something to him, then put both hands on
his shoulders and shook him till his head wove back and forth. Crespo stopped
crying, but his hands remained over his face.

‘What are you doing in this
apartment, Commissario? I’m Signor Crespo’s legal representative, and I refuse
to permit the police to continue to brutalize him.’

Brunetti didn’t answer but
continued to study the pair at the sofa. The older man moved to sit beside
Crespo and put a protective arm around his shoulders, and Crespo gradually grew
quiet.

‘I asked you a question,
Commissario,’ Santomauro said.

‘I came to ask Signor Crespo if
he could help us identify the victim of a crime. I showed him a photo of the
man. You see his response. Rather strong way to respond to the death of a man
he didn’t recognize, wouldn’t you say?’

The man in the sweater looked at
Brunetti but it was Santomauro who spoke. ‘If Signor Crespo has said he didn’t
recognize him, then you have your answer and can leave.’

‘Of course,’ Brunetti said, tucking
the folder under his right arm and taking a step towards the door. Glancing
back at Santomauro, voice easy and conversational, Brunetti said, ‘You forgot
to tie your shoes, Avvocato.’

Santomauro looked down and saw
immediately that they were both tied neatly. He gave Brunetti a look that would
have etched glass but said nothing.

Brunetti stopped in front of the
sofa and looked down at Crespo. ‘My name is Brunetti,’ he said. ‘If you
remember anything, you can call me at the Questura in Venice.’

Santomauro started to speak but
cut himself short. Brunetti let himself out of the apartment.

* * * *

Chapter Nine

The
rest of the day was no more productive, neither for Brunetti nor for the two
other policemen working their way down the list. When they met back at the
Questura late in the afternoon, Gallo reported that three of the men on his
part of the list said they had no idea of who the man was. They were probably
telling the truth, two others weren’t home, and another said he thought the man
looked familiar but couldn’t remember why or how. Scarpa’s experience had been
much the same; all of the men he spoke to were sure they had never seen the
dead man.

They agreed that they would try
the same approach the next day, trying to finish up the names on the list.
Brunetti asked Gallo to prepare a second list of the female whores who worked
both out by the factories and on Via Cappuccina. Though he didn’t have much
hope that these women would help, there was always the possibility that they
had paid attention to the competition and would recognize the man.

As Brunetti climbed the steps to
his apartment, he fantasized about what would happen when he opened the door.
Magically, elves would have come in during the day and air-conditioned the
entire place; others would have installed one of those showers he had seen only
in brochures from spas and on American soap operas: twenty different shower
heads would direct needle-thin streams of scented water at his body, and when
he finished with the shower, he would wrap himself in a thick towel of imperial
size. And then there would be a bar, perhaps the sort set at the end of a
swimming pool, and a white-jacketed barman would offer him a long, cool drink
with a hibiscus floating on its surface. His immediate physical needs attended
to, he passed to science fiction and conjured up two children both dutiful and
obedient and a devoted wife who would tell him, the instant he opened the door,
that the case had been solved and they were all free to leave for vacation the
following morning.

Reality, as is ever its wont, was
discovered to be somewhat different. His family had retreated to the terrace
which was filled with the first cool of early evening. Chiara looked up from
her book, said ‘
Ciao
, Pap
à
,’ tilted her chin to receive his
kiss, and then dived back into the pages. Raffi looked up from that month’s
issue of
Gente Uomo,
repeated Chiara’s greeting, and then himself dived
back to a consideration of the compelling need for linen. Paola, seeing his
state, got to her feet, put her arms around him, and kissed him on the lips.

‘Guido, go take a shower, and I’ll
get you something to drink.’ A bell pealed out, somewhere to the left of them,
Raffi flipped a page, and Brunetti reached up to loosen his tie.

‘Put a hibiscus in it,’ he said
and turned to go take his shower.

Twenty minutes later, he sat,
dressed in loose cotton pants and a linen shirt, with his bare feet up on the
railing of the terrace, and told Paola about the day. The children had
disappeared, no doubt off in pursuit of some dutiful and obedient activity.

‘Santomauro?’ she asked. ‘Giancarlo
Santomauro?’

‘The very one.’

‘How delicious,’ she said, voice
rich with real delight. ‘I wish I’d never had to promise you I wouldn’t talk
about what you tell me; this one is wonderful.’ And she repeated Santomauro’s
name.

‘You don’t tell people, do you,
Paola?’ he asked, though he knew he shouldn’t.

She started to shoot back an
angry answer, but then she leaned over and put her hand on his knee. ‘No,
Guido. I’ve never repeated anything. And never will.’

‘I’m sorry I asked,’ he said,
looking down and sipping at his Campari soda.

‘Do you know his wife?’ she
asked, veering back to the original topic.

‘I think I was introduced to her
once, at a concert somewhere, a couple of years ago. But I don’t think I’d
remember her if I saw her again. What’s she like?’

Paola sipped at her drink, then
placed the glass on the top of the railing, something she was repeatedly
forbidding the children to do. ‘Well,’ she began, considering how most acidly
to answer the question. ‘If I were Signor, no, Avvocato Santomauro and I were
given the choice between my tall, thin, impeccably well-dressed wife, she of
the Margaret Thatcher
coiffure,
to make no mention of disposition, and a
young boy, regardless of his height, hair or disposition, there is no doubt
that my arms would reach out and embrace that boy.’

‘How do you know her?’ Brunetti
asked, as ever ignoring the rhetoric and attending to the substance.

‘She’s a client of Biba’s,’ she
said, naming a friend of hers who was a jeweller. ‘I’ve met her a few times in
the shop, and then I met them at my parents’ place at one of those dinners you
didn’t go to.’ Figuring that this was a way of getting back at him for having
asked if she told people what he said to her, Brunetti let it pass.

‘What are they like together?’

‘She does all the talking, and he
just stands around and glowers, as if there were nothing and no one within a
radius of ten kilometres who could ever possibly measure up to his high
standards. I always thought they were a pair of sanctimonious, self-important
bigots. All I had to do was listen to her talk for five minutes, and I knew it:
she’s like a minor character in a Dickens novel, one of the pious, malevolent
ones. Because she did all the talking, I was never sure about him, had to go on
instinct, but I’m very pleased to learn that I was right.’

‘Paola,’ he cautioned, ‘I have no
reason to believe he was there for any other reason than to give Crespo legal
advice.’

‘And he had to take his shoes off
to do that?’ she asked with a snort of disbelief. ‘Guido, please come back to
this century, all right? Avvocato Santomauro was there for one reason only, and
it had nothing to do with his profession, not unless he has worked out a very
interesting payment plan for Signor Crespo.’

Paola, he had learned over the
course of more than two decades, had the tendency to Go Too Far. He was
uncertain, even after all this time, whether this was a vice or a virtue, but
there was no doubt that it was an irremovable part of her character. She even
got a certain wild look in her eye when she was planning to Go Too Far, which
look he saw there now. He had no idea what form it would take, but he knew it
was coming.

‘Do you think he’s arranged the
same payment plan for the Patriarch?’

In those same decades, he had
also learned that the only way to deal with her tendency was to ignore her
completely. ‘As I was saying,’ Brunetti continued, ‘the fact that he was in the
apartment proves nothing.’

‘I hope you’re right, or I’d have
to worry every time I saw him coming out of the Patriarchal Palace or the
Basilica, wouldn’t I?’

He did no more than glance in her
direction.

‘All right, Guido, he was there
on business, legal business.’ She allowed a few moments to pass and then added,
in a completely different voice, so as to alert him that she was now going to
behave and treat this seriously, ‘But you said that Crespo recognized the man
in the picture.’