By Its Cover (21 page)

When the waiter’s footsteps had disappeared, she raised her eyes to Brunetti’s and asked, ‘What do you want to know?’

‘I’d like you to tell me what happened that afternoon in Viale Garibaldi.’

‘After half a year?’ she asked. She gave him a steady look, licked at her lips, looked away.

Brunetti shrugged. ‘Police work is like that. We settle something, and then something else happens and we have to go back and re-examine the original incident.’

‘What’s happened to make that necessary?’

She had paid no particular attention to the newspaper, so it was likely she had not read about Franchini’s murder. He felt no obligation to mention it to her: let her talk as though the man were still alive.

‘Nothing that affects you in any way, Signora,’ he said, uncertain that this was true. ‘I’d like you to tell me what happened.’ He was careful not to ask about specific events or persons. He wanted her to believe he was interested only in the facts, as if he were simply double-checking the existing report.

She looked up and again met Brunetti’s glance. ‘I sometimes walk down the Viale to get the vaporetto. I like it because it’s so wide and open, and there are trees.’ Brunetti nodded, as would any Venetian. ‘That morning, I saw someone I knew and stopped to talk to him. After I left,
my ex-companion showed up and there was some sort of trouble between them. I wasn’t there and didn’t see what happened.’ Then, a note of exasperation slipping into her voice, she said, ‘I’ve already told the police all about this.’ Before Brunetti could comment, the waiter returned and set their coffees and two small glasses of water in front of them. He moved the ceramic bowl with the sugar packets a centimetre closer to the woman, nodded to Brunetti, and left the room.

Brunetti poured sugar into his coffee and stirred it. He took a sip, replaced the cup. ‘You said you knew the person?’

Instead of answering, she pulled the bowl closer. She took an envelope and tore it open slowly, poured it into her coffee and stirred it. Then she looked at Brunetti as if she had answered his question and were waiting for a different one.

‘You said you knew the person?’

A trio of women, wearing hooded sweatshirts and running shoes, came in and moved chairs around until they all fitted at the table nearest the window. They spoke noisily in a language Brunetti did not recognize until one of them caught his glance and shushed the others to lower their voices.

He turned back to Signora Marzi, who said, ‘He lived in the neighbourhood. People told me about him.’ She folded her hands in her lap, her coffee apparently forgotten. Brunetti waited for her to say something else. Her right hand slid free of the other and began to finger the fabric of the tablecloth as though she were trying to decide if it were of a quality worth buying.

Brunetti finished his coffee, sat back and crossed his arms.

Looking up from the tablecloth, she said, ‘I told you: I didn’t see what happened.’

‘How did you hear about it?’ Brunetti asked.

She seemed genuinely surprised by the question. ‘You called me.’ Seeing his momentary confusion she explained: ‘The police.’ Making no attempt to disguise her exasperation, she went on, ‘I’d already made a number of complaints about him, so they called me when they arrested him.’ Then, truculently, ‘Don’t you people keep records?’

‘The man was hurt,’ he told her, ignoring her provocation.

‘My ex-companion is a very strong man,’ she said.

‘You said you knew the man on the bench.’

‘Why are you asking me all of this?’

‘I don’t understand why your companion would hit a man just because you spoke to him.’

Signora Marzi opened her purse and pulled out a cotton handkerchief covered with small pink roses. She used it to wipe at the corners of her mouth, even though she had yet to touch her coffee. The bright pink lip gloss she had been wearing when she came in had all but disappeared. She refolded the handkerchief and replaced it, opening the bag long enough for Brunetti to recognize the discreet Hermès logo on the inner lining.

‘It’s enough that I was talking to him,’ she finally said. Again, she moistened her lips.

‘Had you spoken to him before?’

‘Someone told me he was a priest, so I thought I could trust him,’ she offered by way of answer. She did not seem the type of woman who would trust a priest – or anyone, for that matter – but he nodded in understanding.

‘Was it something you couldn’t trust your friends with?’ he asked.

She folded her hands in her lap again. ‘I wanted to talk to someone about him.’ Brunetti worked out the pronoun.

‘I see. And did the priest help you?’ he asked, failing to say that it seemed a strangely intimate subject to discuss
with a man she barely knew. Standing in front of a park bench.

Her glance was quick and suspicious, as if she feared he knew far more than he was saying. She shook her head. ‘No. He didn’t help. He said he wasn’t a priest any more and didn’t have any advice to give me.’

She suddenly remembered her coffee and raised the cup to her lips but was surprised to find it cold. She set the cup back on the saucer.

‘You’d spoken to him before, then?’ Brunetti asked.

She greeted this question with a look of studied confusion but said nothing.

‘The man on the bench,’ Brunetti clarified. ‘The one your ex-companion hit.’ He waited a few beats before adding, ‘He ended up in the hospital. Did you know that?’

She nodded. ‘Yes.’ Nothing more.

‘Had you spoken to him before?’

She made a face to suggest irritation: lips pulled together in a straight line, eyes narrowed. Brunetti looked across at her calmly, like a man waiting for a cloud to pass so he could return to enjoying the sunshine.

‘Maybe,’ she conceded. Brunetti directed his gaze towards the window and the passing people in order to hide any involuntary sign of triumph. The waiter came in then and took the order of the three women, who were now speaking to one another in the sort of voices generally used in church. The waiter glanced at Brunetti, who shook his head. The waiter left.

‘As a priest?’ Brunetti inquired mildly, thinking how similar most interviews – although he always thought of them as interrogations – were. Once they started to talk and found that their interrogator believed them, people with things to hide felt safe enough to begin the minor lies that would end up trapping them. The only way to avoid
this was to refuse to speak to the police about anything, without a lawyer, but few people had the sense to do this, believing themselves clever enough to talk their way out of most things.

Her voice grew more serious. ‘When I met him, I didn’t know he had been a priest.’

‘Where did you meet him? How long ago?’

She should have been prepared for the question; perhaps she was. ‘There. In the park. Some time last year. I used to go every now and then in the morning to sit in the sun. It’s on the way to the boat, so if I leave early enough, I can stop there for half an hour on my way to work.’ Brunetti said nothing, asked nothing.

‘He used to sit there and read, and one day the only free seat was next to him, so I asked if I could sit there, and we started talking.’

‘About his book?’

‘No,’ she said adamantly. ‘I don’t read.’

Brunetti nodded in understanding, as if this were the most normal thing in the world.

‘We talked about things. Real things.’ Take that, books, Brunetti thought. He was curious about how a woman of her age, apparently single, could have enough free time to spend her days sitting on a bench in Viale Garibaldi or, in fact, how she could be free at such short notice to come and talk to him.

She used the silence to drink her glass of water. All along, Brunetti had been attentive for any sign of her emotional response to the man on the bench – whose name they had not used – but there had been none. She had apparently been displeased when Brunetti asked about him, even more so when he persisted, but, for all the feeling she displayed at mention of the man, Brunetti might as well have been talking about the weather. In fact, the only
emotion he could read, which filled the air around her as if with a low hum, was nervousness that her meeting with the man on the bench might be of interest to the police.

‘You said you stopped there on your way to work, Signora. Could you tell me where you work?’

‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked, eyes sharp.

‘Curiosity,’ he said and smiled.

‘I’m a secretary,’ she said, then, seeing his response, added, ‘though I’m really more what the English call an administrative assistant.’ She gave it the pronunciation of someone who spoke the language with difficulty.

‘Oh,’ he said, sounding impressed by this career distinction: ‘to a private person?’

‘Yes, Marchese Piero Dolfin.’

The name conjured in Brunetti’s memory the inside cover of the books in Franchini’s apartment: ‘P D’ and the leaping dolphin on the two insignia.

As casually as he could make it sound, Brunetti said, ‘He’s a friend of my father-in-law.’

As if he had made a boast she had to better, Marzi said, ‘Yes, it’s a very old family, one of the oldest in the city.’

Indeed it was, Brunetti knew, although the branch of the family she was talking about had arrived from Genova at the time of Unification with an entirely different surname and had bought their title from the new King of Italy, deliberately choosing one of the oldest names in the city to attach it to.

As if unable to restrain his interest in so fascinating a job, Brunetti asked, ‘What sorts of things do you do?’

While she answered, Brunetti considered the possibilities that might explain the presence of books from the Dolfin library in Franchini’s bookshelf, though there could be only one. He turned back to what Signora Marzi was saying. ‘… founding members of the Rotary Club,’ she concluded.

‘That’s certainly impressive,’ Brunetti said, knowing that whatever she had said would surely have been intended to sound so. He smiled across at her, all the time asking himself, did she know or was she used?

Brunetti was suddenly aware that two other tables were now filled: at one sat a Japanese couple in late middle age, both of whom reminded him of the Contessa Morosini-Albani by sitting with at least ten centimetres between their backs and those of the chairs, and at another a pair of blonde teenaged girls, staring about with wide-eyed delight.

He retrieved the folded newspaper from the table beside him and passed it to Signora Marzi without comment. She was surprised but took it automatically, giving him a confused look.

Brunetti said nothing.

She lowered her head and glanced at the headlines. He waited. At a certain point, he saw her left hand contract, crumpling the paper and making a noise that could be heard at the tables near to them. When she finished, she set it on the table between them. She kept her eyes on the newspaper, refusing to look at him.

‘What did you do for him?’ Brunetti asked in a conversational voice.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, a statement which had, by overuse, come to mean the opposite.

‘Franchini,’ Brunetti said, pointing at the newspaper. ‘The man in the park, the man your companion sent to the hospital but who didn’t press charges against him. What did you do for him?’

Brunetti was fishing. He’d linked different strands; although he didn’t know how they were woven together, he knew they were joined. ‘As you like,’ he said and
shrugged. But then he gave his best boyish smile and said, ‘Il Marchese Dolfin will be delighted to have his Sophocles back, I’m sure.’

‘His what?’ she asked nervously.

‘His copy of Sophocles. It’s a Manutius. 1502. I’m sure he’ll be relieved.’ He gave that a moment to sink in, then asked, ‘Has he noticed it’s missing, do you know? Or the other one?’

Her voice was dull when she said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ This time, he believed her.

‘Books from his library. Rare books. That’s why I think he’ll be pleased to have them back.’ Then, as if the thought had just come to him, he smiled again and said, ‘And it’s because of you he’ll get them back, isn’t it?’ He stopped himself from leaning forward and patting her arm in congratulation, but he did nod his head in approval. ‘Just think, if you hadn’t told me you worked for Marchese Dolfin, I would never have realized that the books were his.’

He suspected he might be overplaying his hand, but she had irritated him with her dogged refusal to answer his questions, so he wanted at least to enjoy her discomfiture, base as he knew his desire to be. He met her glance, all smiles gone now.

‘Are they valuable?’

‘Very,’ he answered.

‘How much are they worth?’

‘I have no idea. Ten thousand Euros, perhaps. Fifteen?’ Her mouth fell open, and Brunetti added, ‘Perhaps more.’

She astonished him by putting her elbows on the table and burying her face in her hands. He heard her moan. It struck him that he had, in the past, only read about this and had never actually heard anyone do it. It was ugly, a noise that would bring people to her aid, should they
hear her and not know what was wrong. Even he, who had not warmed to her, felt an atavistic desire to help or comfort her.

Instead, he said, ‘Of course, the Marchese will want to know how the books ended up in Franchini’s possession, but that’s perhaps explained by the fact that you know him, and have known him for some time. I hope he’s not so narrow-minded, the Marchese, that he would hold it against you that your ex-companion knew the man in whose house the missing books were found. But you thought he was a priest, didn’t you, not a thief?’ He stopped himself then, not liking his tone, nor the fact that the noise she was making, though diminished, could still be heard. Nor did he like the fact that people at the two tables nearest them had turned to stare, as though they held him responsible for her moaning. Which, he admitted, he was.

She pulled her hands from her face, said, ‘Outside,’ got to her feet and pushed past him towards the front door of the café.

18

He left twenty Euros on the table to be sure. After all, Florian’s was Florian’s, and the last thing he wanted now was to be called back for not paying his bill. Outside, he stood on the steps and looked over the Piazza, hoping she had not been absorbed into the crowds.