By Its Cover (22 page)

And there she was, standing beside one of the tables at the edge of the serving space in front of the café, holding her handbag, which gaped open. Two men of about his age walked by, giving her appreciative glances. One of them stopped to speak to her, but she shook her head and moved away from them. The men continued on their way, though the one who had spoken to her turned to watch her as she walked away.

Brunetti followed her for a moment and then quickened his pace to reach her side. ‘Signora Marzi,’ he said, ‘are you all right?’

She turned to face him, her glance level. She grasped her handbag and zipped it closed. ‘He’ll fire me if he finds out. You know that, don’t you?’ she demanded.

‘It depends on what he finds out,’ Brunetti answered.

‘If you found the books, it means Franchini was in his apartment.’ When Brunetti failed to confirm this, she demanded, ‘How else could he take them?’

‘With your help?’ he asked.

‘What?’ she asked, missing a step; she came down heavily on her left foot and lurched into his side. She pulled away from him as though he’d put his hands upon her. ‘Help him? Him?
Quello sporco ladro?
’ she demanded, her face suffused with blood, saliva spitting as she said ‘
sporco
’. She had just read of the man’s death, yet she called him a dirty thief.

‘When did he steal them?’ he asked.

She turned and started to walk away from him, heading for the far end of the Piazza. He followed her for some time, then stepped past a man and woman walking arm in arm to move up beside her. Matching his steps to hers, Brunetti said, ‘Signora, I’m interested in his murder, not in stolen books.’ This was not strictly true, but murder had trumped theft; he was interested in the more serious crime and would bargain away any interest in theft if it got him closer to understanding or solving the murder.

‘I don’t care about the books, Signora. If it will help you, I’ll give you back the books Franchini took from the Marchese.’

That stopped her. She turned to him and demanded, ‘In return for what?’

‘Tell me what you know about Franchini and how he got the books, and you can have them.’

‘But I must give them back to him?’ she asked, voice high and tight, trying to provoke him into making that condition.

‘The books are of no value to me, Signora. You’re free to do whatever you want with them.’

Both her face and her voice softened. ‘He’s been good to me. He gave me this job and he trusts me. Of course I’ll give them back.’

Suddenly Brunetti was conscious of how crowded the place was. There were people everywhere, hundreds of them – more than that: walking, standing, taking photos, making videos, posing with pigeons on their shoulders, tossing corn to the birds, looking into windows, pausing to talk to the person next to them. He looked around the Piazza and saw a multi-coloured sea of them, their noise like the disjointed slaps of choppy surf. He tried to think of somewhere to go to escape them, but he failed absolutely. Nowhere within a radius of two bridges, five minutes’ walk, could he recall a quiet place. They would have to go into a bar or a shop or a church to wipe out the sight and sound of them.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

There was nothing he could tell her. She was Venetian: he knew that from having listened to her. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘To work,’ she said.

He had no idea where that might be, but still he asked, ‘May I come along with you? We can talk.’

As if waking from a deep sleep, she looked around and saw the people, heard the low murmur. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This way.’ She turned towards XXII Marzo and walked quickly away from the Piazza. As they approached the bridge, the street widened and the crowds had room to spread out.

Just before the bridge, she said, ‘I was involved with Aldo for a few months before that time in the park. He had been a friend of Roberto’s for a long time.’ Then, to be sure Brunetti understood, she said, ‘My ex-companion.’

Brunetti nodded, and she started up the bridge. She stopped at the top and turned to look towards the Grand Canal. She folded her arms, one hand holding the bag. ‘I think Roberto sold him things.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Things he bought from people.’

‘Stolen things?’ Brunetti asked to save time.

‘I think so.’

She knew so, or she wouldn’t have mentioned it, but Brunetti said nothing. She went on. ‘Some of them were books. I saw them a few times, when we were still living together and Aldo’d come to get the things Roberto sold to him.’ And she didn’t call the police, Brunetti said to himself, but then he told that same self to shut up because most people wouldn’t call them, either.

‘Old books?’ he asked, but only to make sure.

‘Yes. He used to come to our apartment. He was always polite with me, even if he came when Roberto wasn’t there. So it … so it just started. Roberto had to go to Cremona for a few days once, and … well, Aldo was always so nice to me.’ Her eyes turned away from his and back to the canal and she said, ‘In the beginning.’

‘What happened?’

As if addressing her words to the water, she said, ‘After Roberto came back and after it … happened, I suppose I was different with Aldo or when he was around, and Roberto saw it. That’s when the trouble started.’

‘Trouble?’

‘Threats,’ she said and looked at Brunetti again. ‘But only to me. It was like Aldo had nothing to do with it. Once Roberto showed me a gun and said he’d use it if I ever talked to another man. That’s when I went to the police. My sister was there when he said it, so there was a witness, thank God. I moved out. I left everything and
moved out. The Marchese – I had just started to work for him – he had his lawyer help me, and that’s how I got the order against Roberto.’

‘And the books?’ Brunetti asked. ‘How did Franchini manage to steal them?’

She glanced down at the gondolieri sitting on benches along the embankment, occasionally jumping up to welcome the tourists who came to talk to them or bargain for prices. As if anyone could out-bargain a gondoliere, Brunetti thought.

She cleared her throat a few times but then, he thought, forced herself to look at him as she said, ‘The Marchese let me stay in a small guest apartment in the
palazzo
while I looked for something bigger.’ He watched her fight against the temptation of silence, and then she said, ‘Aldo sometimes came there with me.’ Her voice was barely audible above the slap of footsteps on the bridge and the loud voices of the gondolieri. ‘And once when we were there, he went into the other part of the
palazzo
when I was … asleep.‘ She backed away from the railing and stood up straight. ‘That’s when I knew what he wanted.’

‘Had he done this before?’ Brunetti asked.

Again, he watched her struggle. ‘He must have,’ she said at last.

‘What did you do?’

‘The next time he called me, I told him it was over.’

‘And?’

She looked away before she answered this question. ‘He laughed and said he was relieved.’ Brunetti had always admired courage: hearing her say this in a steady voice, his estimation of her rose.

‘Why did you talk to him in the park?’

‘It was the first time I’d seen him since the phone call. I was surprised to see him there, so I stopped and asked
him what he wanted, and he said he didn’t want anything, that he was just sitting there, reading. That’s what Roberto saw, the two of us talking, and when I left, he went and threatened him. And that’s when it happened.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘Did you ever go to his home?’

‘No. I didn’t know he lived in Castello until I read it. Just now.’ She waved back towards the Piazza, and Florian’s, and the newspaper.

She began to walk down the bridge, Brunetti beside her, slipping eel-like through the streams. She turned right at the carpet shop, heading towards La Fenice, passed in front of the theatre, and continued on past the Ateneo Veneto. On the far side of the next bridge she stopped and opened her handbag. She pulled out a set of keys. ‘It’s down here,’ she said, making it clear that he was to come no farther.

As if they had been talking all along and this was just another question in their conversation, he said, ‘Did you ever get the sense that he was buying things from other people, not only from Roberto?’

Franchini had sat in the same room as Nickerson for weeks, had certainly had the opportunity to observe his behaviour. ‘My brother was a thief and a blackmailer, a liar and a fraud.’ Like a favourite bar of music, the words sounded in his mind.

She ran the keys through her fingers as if they were a metal rosary. Finally she said, ‘His only interest in other people was finding their weak spot and using it to get what he wanted from them.’ She let the keys jangle in her hand, then added, ‘But I think he’d buy from other people; yes.’

Brunetti studied the houses on the other side of the canal. Her voice was replaced by the continued click of the keys against one another and then by the footsteps of people coming down the
calle
and crossing the bridge.

‘I remember,’ she said, ‘one time, when Roberto showed him a book, he said he already had a copy but he’d take it anyway.’

‘Do you remember what the book was?’

‘No. They all looked the same to me: old, with leather covers. I don’t know why anyone would want them.’

Even before Brunetti could decide not to try to explain, she added, ‘But if he could sell them for a lot of money, then they’re worth something, aren’t they?’

He nodded, gave her his card and asked her to call him on his
telefonino
if she remembered anything else.

He was surprised that she offered him her hand and even more surprised that he was not unpleased to shake it.

19

He backtracked and took the Number One from Santa Maria del Giglio to save time as well as to avoid the crowds, though the vaporetto, at this hour, was perhaps not the better choice. The disembarking and embarking at the few stops he had to pass seemed to take for ever, with crowds blocking the exit, both from the boat and from the landing. After a six-minute delay – he timed it – at Vallaresso, he was ready to commandeer the boat or dial Foa’s number and tell him to come and rescue him. He calmed himself for the rest of the ride with the scene of Foa’s pulling up beside the moving vaporetto – much in the way he had picked them up at the Punta della Dogana – and himself leaping from one to the other while the remaining passengers viewed the event with a mixture of astonishment and envy.

He pushed this scenario from his mind and concentrated on what Signora Marzi had told him: a man apparently without a conscience, who would not only buy stolen
books but, if the opportunity arose, also steal them himself. Yet they had found only seventeen volumes in his apartment, hardly the hoard of a major fence and thief. They had found no diary, nor an address book – not even a computer – only the simplest uncharged
telefonino
that had not a single number programmed into it and had not made or received a call in more than three months.

When he reached the Questura, he stopped in the officers’ squad room, but neither Vianello nor Pucetti was there. He went to Signorina Elettra’s office, where he found her in conversation with Commissario Claudia Griffoni, Signorina Elettra at her desk and Griffoni leaning against the windowsill, the place Brunetti had come to consider, over the years, as his. They stopped when he came in, and he said, before thinking, ‘I don’t want to interrupt,’ realizing, as soon as the words were out, how much he sounded like a jealous husband.

Claudia laughed and said, ‘All you’ve interrupted is a discussion of a way to access the files of the Department of Foreign Affairs.’ The memory of her saying this, and so lightly, and the amusement her remark caused Signorina Elettra, would no doubt pull him out of a sound sleep, at some future time, when the whole lot of them were under investigation by the Security Services for the unauthorized pillaging – he thought he should use the proper word – these two women, their friendship so long in forming, were now capable of committing. Pucetti and Vianello, he feared, had also been corrupted by them, sucked into a cyber-gyre that could lead – or so he feared in his darkest moments – to ineluctable ruin.

‘For what purpose?’ he asked, calmly.

‘There’s a rumour going around,’ Signorina Elettra said, not supplying either the source or scope of that rumour, ‘that someone in the Department has managed to make
a copy of the Mafia–Stato conversations. We thought it would be interesting to listen to them.’

The Romans, he knew, honoured the goddess Fama, she of the thousand-windowed house of reverberating bronze, she who heard and repeated everything, first in whispers, then in a booming voice. Surely she would be interested in repeating the telephone conversations of politicians, recorded decades ago, in which they discussed seriously the possibility of making a non-aggression pact with the Mafia. True or not? Fact or fiction? The highest court had ruled that the tapes of those purported conversations be destroyed, but Rumour declared they had been copied before that could be done.

Brunetti remembered a time when he had cared about things like this, felt indignation and rage that such things could happen, even that people could believe that they could happen. And now he listened and nodded, neither believing nor disbelieving, wanting only to get on with his work and then go home and be with his family and read the literary record left by the people to whom Rumour was indeed a goddess.

‘May I help you, Commissario?’ Signorina Elettra asked.

Griffoni moved away from the windowsill, but Brunetti held up a hand to stop her from leaving. He turned to Signorina Elettra. ‘It’s about Signora Marzi,’ he said.

He saw from her look that she had found nothing and so was prepared when she said, ‘I have birth certificate, school reports, health records, certificate of residence, job history, bank statements, tax returns, but there’s nothing in any way unusual. She’s never been arrested, was once questioned as a possible witness – when Franchini was assaulted – but there was nothing she could say because she wasn’t present when it happened. She also had an injunction served against her former companion, who had threatened her in the presence of a witness.’