The Death of Faith (9 page)

‘My uncle Luigi, in Trieste, collected them. I always loved going to visit him when I was a boy because he’d show them to me and let me touch them.’ As if to eliminate that fearful possibility from taking root in Signor da Prè’s mind, Vianello grasped his hands behind his back and did no more than lean closer to the boxes. He pulled his hands apart and pointed to one, careful to keep his finger at least a handsbreadth away from the box. ‘Is this one Dutch?’

‘Which one?’ da Prè asked, getting down from his chair and going over to stand beside the sergeant.

Da Prè’s head came barely to the top of the sideboard, so he had to stand on tiptoe to see to the back of the surface, to the box that Vianello was pointing at. ‘Yes, it’s Delft. Eighteenth-century.’

‘And this one?’ Vianello asked, pointing still and not presuming to touch. ‘Bavarian?’

‘Very good,’ da Prè said, picking up the tiny box and handing it to the sergeant, who was careful to take it in both cupped hands.

Vianello turned it over and looked at the bottom. ‘Yes, there’s the mark,’ he said, tilting it toward da Prè. ‘It’s a real beauty, isn’t it?’ he said in a voice rich with enthusiasm. ‘My uncle would have loved this one, especially the way it’s divided into two chambers.’

As the two men, heads close together, continued to examine the small boxes, Brunetti looked around the room. Three of the paintings were seventeenth-century, very bad paintings and very bad seventeenth-century: the death of stags, boars, and then more stags. There was too much blood in them and far too much artistically posed death to interest Brunetti. The others appeared to be biblical scenes, but they too all had to do with the shedding of great quantities of blood, this time human. Brunetti turned his attention to the ceiling, which had an elaborately stuccoed centre medallion, from the middle of which hung a Murano glass chandelier made of hundreds of small-petalled pastel flowers.

He glanced again at the two men, now crouched down in front of an open door on the right side of the cupboard. The shelves inside held what seemed to Brunetti to be hundreds more of the tiny boxes. For a moment, Brunetti felt himself suffocated with the strangeness of this giant’s living room in which a tiny doll of a man had trapped himself, with only these bright enamelled momentos of a forgotten age to remind himself of what must be, for him, the true scale of things.

The two men got to their feet as Brunetti watched. Da Prè closed the door of the cabinet and came back to his chair and with a little, practised hop resumed his place in it. Vianello lingered a moment, giving a last admiring glance at the boxes arrayed across the top, but then returned to his own chair.

Brunetti dared a smile for the first time, and da Prè, returning it and glancing toward Vianello, said, ‘I didn’t know such people worked for the police.’

Neither did Brunetti, but that didn’t for a moment stop him from saying, ‘Yes, the sergeant is quite well known at the Questura for his interest in snuffboxes.’

Hearing in Brunetti’s tone the irony with which the unenlightened perpetually regard the true enthusiast, da Prè said, ‘They’re an important part of European culture, snuff boxes. Some of the finest craftsmen on the continent devoted years of their lives — decades — to making them. There was no better way for a person to show appreciation than by giving a snuff box. Mozart, Haydn . . .’ Da Prè’s enthusiasm overcame his words, and he finished with a wild flourish of one of his little arms toward the laden sideboard.

Vianello, who had nodded in silent assent through all of this speech, said to Brunetti, ‘I’m afraid you don’t understand, Commissario.’

Brunetti, who had no idea how he had deserved to be sent this clever man who could so easily disarm even the most antagonistic witness, nodded in humble agreement.

‘Did your sister share your enthusiasm?’ Vianello’s question was seamless.

The little man kicked one tiny foot at the rung of his chair. ‘No, my sister had no enthusiasm for them.’ Vianello shook his head at such an error, and da Prè, encouraged by that, added, ‘And no enthusiasm for anything else.’

‘None at all?’ Vianello asked, with what sounded like real concern.

‘No,’ da Prè repeated. ‘Not unless you count her enthusiasm for priests.’ The manner in which he pronounced the last word suggested that the only enthusiasm he was likely to have for priests would arise from signing the orders for their execution.

Vianello shook his head, as if he could think of no greater peril, especially for a woman, than to fall into the hands of priests.

Voice filled with horror, Vianello asked, ‘She didn’t leave them anything, did she?’ Then, just as quickly, he added, ‘I’m sorry. It’s not my place to ask.’

‘No, that’s quite all right, Sergeant,’ da Prè said. ‘They tried, but they didn’t get a lira.’ A smirk filled his face, and he added, ‘No one who tried to get anything from her estate succeeded.’

Vianello smiled broadly to show his joy at this narrow avoidance of disaster. Propping his elbow on the arm of his chair and his chin on his palm, he settled in to hear the tale of Signor da Prè’s triumph.

The little man pushed himself back in his own chair until his legs were almost completely parallel with the seat. ‘She always had a weakness for religion,’ he began. ‘Our parents sent her to convent schools. I think that’s why she never married.’ Brunetti glanced at da Prè’s hands, gripped atop the arms of his chair, but there was no sign of a wedding ring.

‘We never got along,’ he said simply. ‘She had her interest in religion. And I had mine in art.’ By which, Brunetti assumed, he meant enamelled snuff boxes.

‘When our parents died, they left this apartment to us jointly But we couldn’t live together.’ Vianello nodded here, suggesting how difficult it was to live with a woman. ‘So I sold her my share. Twenty-three years ago. And I bought a smaller apartment. I needed the money to add to my collection.’ Again, Vianello nodded, this time in understanding of the many demands of art.

‘Then, three years ago, she fell and broke her hip, and it wouldn’t heal right, so there was no choice but to put her in the
casa di cura
.’ He stopped speaking here, an old man thinking about the things that made the nursing home inescapable. ‘She asked me to move in here to keep an eye on her things,’ he continued, ‘but I refused. I didn’t know if she’d come back, and then I’d have to move out again. And I didn’t want to have to move the collection in here — I wouldn’t live anywhere without it — and then move it again, should she recover. Too risky, too much chance of breaking something.’ Da Prè’s hands gripped tighter in unconscious terror at this possibility.

Brunetti found that, as the story progressed, he too began to nod in agreement with Signor da Prè, drawn into the lunatic world where a broken lid was a greater tragedy than a broken hip.

‘Then, when she died, she named me her heir, but she tried to give them a hundred million. She’d added that to her will while she was there.’

‘What did you do?’ Vianello asked.

‘I took it to my lawyer,’ da Prè answered instantly. ‘He had me declare that her mind was unsound during the last months of her life — that’s when she signed that thing.’

‘And?’ Vianello prompted.

‘It was thrown out, of course,’ the little man said with great pride. ‘The judges listened to me. It was lunacy on Augusta’s part. So they denied the bequest.’

‘And you inherited everything?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Of course,’ da Prè answered shortly. ‘There’s no one else in the immediate family.’

‘Was her mind unsound?’ Vianello asked.

Da Prè glanced over at the sergeant and answered immediately. ‘Of course not. She was as lucid as she ever was, right up to the last time I saw her, the day before she died. But the bequest was insane.’

Brunetti wasn’t sure he understood the distinction, but instead of seeking clarification, he asked, ‘Did the people at the nursing home appear to know about the bequest?’

‘What do you mean?’ da Prè asked suspiciously.

‘Did anyone from there ask you about the will, or did they oppose your decision to have the bequest denied?’

‘One of them called me before the funeral and asked to give a sermon during the mass. I told him there wasn’t going to be any sermon. Augusta had left instructions in the will about the funeral, wanted a requiem mass, so there was no way I could get around that. But she didn’t say anything specific about a sermon, so at least I stopped them from standing up there and prattling on about another world where all the happy souls will meet again.’ Da Prè smiled here; it was not a pretty smile.

‘One of them came to her funeral,’ he went on. ‘Big man, fat. He came up to me after it and said how great a loss Augusta had been to the “community of Christians”.’ The sarcasm with which da Prè pronounced the words scalded the air around him. ‘Then he said something about how generous she had always been, what a good friend she had been to the order.’ Da Prè stopped talking here and his mind seemed to wander away in pleased recollection of the scene.

‘What did you say?’ Vianello finally asked.

‘I told him the generosity was going into the grave with her,’ da Prè said with another bleak smile.

Neither Vianello nor Brunetti said anything for a moment, and then Brunetti asked, ‘Did they take any legal action?’

‘Against me, do you mean?’ da Prè asked.

Brunetti nodded.

‘No. Nothing.’ Da Prè was silent for a moment and then added, ‘Just because they got their hands on her, that doesn’t mean they could get their hands on her money.’

‘Did she ever talk about this what you call “getting their hands on her”?’ Brunetti asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Did she tell you that they were after her to give them her money?’

‘Tell me?’

‘Yes, did she ever say anything, while she was at the
casa di cura,
about their trying to get her to leave her money to them.’

‘I don’t know,’ da Prè answered.

Brunetti didn’t know how to ask. He left it for da Prè to explain, which he did. ‘It was my duty to go and see her every month, which was all the time I could afford, but we had nothing to say to one another. I’d bring her any post that had accumulated, but it was always just religious things: magazines, requests for money. I’d ask her how she was. But there was nothing we could talk about, so I’d leave.’

‘I see.’ Brunetti saw, getting to his feet; she had been there three years and had left everything to this brother who had been too busy to visit her more than once a month, no doubt occupied with his little boxes.

‘What’s this all about?’ da Prè asked before Brunetti could move away from him. ‘Are they going to try to contest the will?’ Da Prè started to say something else but stopped himself, and Brunetti thought he saw him begin to smile, but then the little man covered his mouth with his hand, and the moment was gone.

‘Nothing, really, Signore. Actually, we’re interested in someone who worked there.’

‘I can’t help you there. I didn’t know any of the staff.’

Vianello got to his feet and came to stand by Brunetti, the warmth of his previous conversation with da Prè serving to mitigate the badly disguised indignation which emanated from his superior.

Da Prè asked no more questions. He got to his feet and led the two men out of the room and then down the corridor to the door of the apartment. There, Vianello took his upraised hand and shook it, thanking him for having shown him the lovely snuffboxes. Brunetti, too, shook the upraised hand, but he gave no thanks and was the first one through the door.

* * * *

Chapter Four

‘Horrible little man, horrible little man,’ Brunetti heard Vianello muttering as they walked down the steps.

Outside, it was cooler, as though da Prè had stolen the warmth from the day. ‘Disgusting little man,’ Vianello continued. ‘He thinks he owns those boxes. The fool.’