‘La Capra?’
‘He didn’t know. But the person who turned him in said that La Capra’s name was used by one of the middle men who arranged the deal.’
‘“Arranged the deal”?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Just like that, set up the robbery of a single piece?’
‘Yes. It’s getting more and more common,’ Carrara answered.
‘And the second?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Well, this one is only rumoured. In fact, we have it listed in with the “unconfirmed”.’
‘What is it?’
‘About two years ago, a dealer in Chinese art in Paris, a certain Philippe Bernadotte, was killed in a mugging while he was out walking his dog one night. His wallet was taken, and his keys. The keys were used to get into his house, but, strangely enough, nothing was stolen. But his papers had been gone through, and it looked like a number of them had been removed.’
‘And La Capra?’
‘The man’s partner could remember only that, a few days before he was killed, Monsieur Bernadotte had referred to a serious argument with a client who had accused him of selling a piece he knew was false.’
‘Was the client Signor La Capra?’
‘The partner didn’t know. All he remembered was that Monsieur Bernadotte repeatedly referred to the client as “the goat”, but at the time his partner thought it was a joke.’
‘Were Monsieur Bernadotte and his partner capable of selling a piece they knew to be false?’ Brunetti asked.
‘The partner, not. But it appears that Bernadotte had been involved in a number of sales, and purchases, that were open to question.’
‘By the art theft police?’
‘Yes. The Paris office had a growing file on him.’
‘But nothing was taken from his home after he was killed?’
‘It would seem not, but whoever killed him also had the time to remove whatever they wanted from his files and from his inventory lists.’
‘So it’s possible that Signor La Capra was the goat that he mentioned to his partner?’
‘So it would seem,’ agreed Carrara.
‘Anything else?’
‘No, but we’d appreciate learning anything else you have to tell about him.’
‘I’ll have my secretary send you what we’ve got, and I’ll let you know anything we find out about him and Semenzato.’
‘Thanks, Guido.’ And Carrara was gone.
What was it Count Almaviva sang? ‘E mi farà il destino ritrovar questo paggio in ogni loco!’ Just so, it seemed to be Brunetti’s destiny to find La Capra everywhere he looked. Somehow, though, Cherubino seemed significantly more innocent than did Signor La Capra. Brunetti had learned more than enough to convince him that La Capra was involved with Semenzato, possibly in his death. But all of it was entirely circumstantial; none of it would have the least value in a court of law.
He heard a knock at his door and called, ‘Avanti.’ A uniformed policeman opened the door, stood back and allowed Flavia Petrelli to enter. As she passed in front of the policeman, Brunetti saw the flash of the officer’s hand moving in a smart salute before he closed the door. Brunetti had not the least doubt about whom the gesture was intended to honour.
She wore a dark brown raincoat lined with fur. The chill of the early evening had brought colour to her face, which, again, was bare of make-up. She came quickly across the room and took his outstretched hand. ‘So this is where you work?’ she asked.
He came around his desk and took the coat which the heat in the room rendered unnecessary. While she looked about her, he put the coat on a hanger on the back of his door. He saw that the outside of the coat was wet, glanced back at her, and saw that her hair was wet as well. ‘Don’t you have an umbrella?’ he asked.
Unconsciously, she put her hand up to her hair and pulled it away, surprised to find it wet. ‘No, it wasn’t raining when I left the house.’
‘When was that?’ he asked, coming back across the room towards her.
‘After lunch. After two, I suppose.’ Her answer was vague, suggesting that she really couldn’t remember.
He pulled a second chair up beside the one that faced his desk and waited for her to sit before sitting opposite her. Even though he had seen her only a few hours ago, Brunetti was struck by the change in her appearance. This morning, she had seemed calm and relaxed, ready to join with him in an Italianate attempt to convince Brett to consider her own safety. But now she seemed stiff and on edge, and the tension showed in the lines around her mouth that, he was sure, hadn’t been there this morning.
‘How’s Brett?’ he asked.
She sighed and swept the fingers of one hand to the side in a dismissive gesture. ‘At times, it’s like talking to one of my children. She agrees with everything I say, admits that everything I say is right, and then decides to do precisely what she wants.’
‘Which, in this case, is what?’ Brunetti asked.
‘To stay here and not go to Milan with me.’
‘When are you leaving?’
‘Tomorrow. There’s an evening flight that gets in at nine. That gives me time to go and open up the apartment and then go back to the airport to meet the children in the morning.’
‘Does she say why she doesn’t want to go?’
Flavia shrugged, as if what Brett said and what was true were two separate things. ‘She says she won’t be frightened away from her own house, that she won’t run away and hide with me.’
‘Isn’t that her real reason?’
‘Who knows what her real reason is?’ she asked with something like anger. ‘It’s enough for Brett to want to do something or not to want to do it. She doesn’t need reasons or excuses. She does just what she wants.’ It was not lost on Brunetti that only another person with the same strength of will could find the quality so outrageous.
Though he was tempted to ask Flavia why she had come to see him, Brunetti asked, instead, ‘Is there any way you could convince her to go with you?’
‘You obviously don’t know her very well,’ Flavia said dryly, but then she smiled. ‘No, I don’t think there is. It’d probably be easier if someone told her not to go; then she’d be forced to do it, I suppose.’ She shook her head and repeated, ‘Just like my children.’
‘Would you like me to talk to her?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Do you think it would do any good?’
It was his turn to shrug. ‘I don’t know. I’m not very successful with my own children.’
She looked up, surprised. ‘I didn’t know you had children.’
‘It’s a natural enough thing for a man my age, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ she answered, and considered her next remark before speaking. ‘It’s just that I know you as a policeman, almost as if you weren’t a real person.’ Before he could say it, she added, ‘Yes, I know, and you know me as a singer.’
‘Well, I don’t really, do I?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean? We met when I was singing.’
‘Yes, but the performance was over. And, since then, I’ve only heard you sing on discs. And I’m afraid it’s not the same.’
She gave him a long look, glanced down at her lap, and then back at him. ‘If I gave you tickets to the La Scala performance, would you come?’
‘Yes, I would. Gladly.’
Her smile was open. ‘And who would you bring?’
‘My wife,’ he said simply.
‘Ah,’ she said, just as simply. How rich a single syllable could be. The smile disappeared for a moment, and when it returned, it was just as friendly, but a bit less warm.
He repeated his question. ‘Would you like me to try to talk to her?’
‘Yes. She trusts you a great deal, so she might listen to you. Someone’s got to convince her to leave Venice. I can’t.’
Unsettled by the urgency in her voice, he said, ‘I don’t think there’s really any great danger in her remaining here. Her apartment is safe, and she has enough sense not to let any
one into it. So there’s very little risk for her.’
‘Yes,’ Flavia agreed with a slowness that showed how unconvinced she was of this. As if she had suddenly come back from a long distance and found herself here, she looked around the room and asked, pulling the neck of her sweater away from her throat, ‘Do you have to stay here much longer?’
‘No, I’m free now, if you’d like to go. I’ll come back with you and see if she’ll listen to me.’
She rose to her feet and went to the window, where she stood, looking towards the covered façade of San Lorenzo and then down at the canal that ran in front of the building. ‘It’s beautiful, but I don’t know how you stand it.’ Did she mean marriage, he wondered. ‘I can stand it for a week, but then I begin to feel trapped.’ Fidelity? She turned and faced him. ‘But even with all the disadvantages, it still is the most beautiful city in the world, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he answered simply and held her coat out for her.
Brunetti took two umbrellas from the cabinet against the wall and handed one of them to Flavia as they left the office. At the front door to the Questura, both guards, who usually contented themselves with giving Brunetti no more than a laconic ‘Buona notte’, pulled themselves to stiff attention and saluted crisply. Outside, the rain pounded down, and the water had begun to rise over the edges of the canal and flood the pavement. He had stopped to pull on his boots, but Flavia wore a pair of low-heeled leather shoes, already soaked from the rain.
He linked his arm in hers and turned to the left. Occasional gusts of wind pushed the rain into their faces, then switched around and drove it against the backs of their legs. They met very few people, and all of them wore boots and oilskins, obviously Venetians who were out of their homes only because they had to be. Without conscious thought, he avoided those streets where he knew the water would already have risen and took them towards Barberia delle Tolle, which ran towards the high ground near the hospital. One bridge short of it, they came to a low-lying stretch of pavement where the slick grey water stood ankle deep. He paused, wondering how to get Flavia across it, but she let go of his arm and walked on, completely ignoring the cold water he could hear squishing up out of her shoes.
Wind and rain blasted across the open space of Campo SS. Giovanni e Paolo. At one corner, a nun stood under the wildly flapping awning in front of a bar, her eviscerated umbrella clutched helplessly in front of her. The Campo itself seemed to have shrunk, its far side eaten up by the growing waters that had turned the canal into a narrow lake that spread steadily outwards from its banks.
Walking quickly, all but running, they hurried across the Campo, splashing their way towards the bridge that would take them down towards Calle della Testa and Brett’s apartment. From the top of the bridge, they could see that the water in front of them was calf deep, but neither of them paused. When they reached the water at the bottom of the bridge, Brunetti switched his umbrella to his left hand and took Flavia’s arm with his right. And not a moment too soon, for she stumbled and fell forward, kept from spilling into the water only by the force of his arm as he pulled her towards him.
‘Porco Giuda,’ she exclaimed, pulling herself upright beside him. ‘My shoe. It’s come off.’ They both stood and looked down into the dark water, hunting for some sign of the missing shoe, but neither of them could make it out. Tentatively, she moved her toe from side to side in front of her, feeling around for the shoe. Nothing. The rain pounded down.
‘Here,’ Brunetti said, closing his umbrella and handing it to her. Quickly, he leaned forward and lifted her from the ground, taking her so by surprise that she wrapped her arms around him, hitting him in the back of the head with the handle of his closed umbrella. He stumbled forward, one arm around her shoulders and one under her knees, regained his balance and walked ahead. He made the two turns and got them to the door of the building before he set her down.
His hair was soaked; rain poured under his collar and down his body. At one point while carrying her, he had stumbled and felt the cold water surging over the top of his boot and down into his shoe. But he had carried her to the doorstep, where he set her down and brushed his hair back from his forehead.
Quickly, she opened the door to the building and splashed into the entrance, where the water was just as high as it was outside. She walked across it and up to the second step, which was dry. Hearing Brunetti splash through the water behind her, she moved up two steps and turned towards him. ‘Thank you.’
She kicked off her other shoe and left it where it lay, then started up the stairs, he following close behind. At the second landing, they heard the music that flowed down the stairs. At the top, in front of the metal door, she selected a key, placed it in the lock, and turned it. The door didn’t move.
She pulled out the key, chose another and turned the lock at the top of the door, then went back and opened the first lock. ‘That’s strange,’ she said, turning to him. ‘It’s double locked.’ It seemed sensible enough to him that Brett would dead-bolt the door from the inside.
‘Brett,’ Flavia called out as she pushed open the door. The music called out to meet them, but not Brett. ‘It’s me,’ Flavia called. ‘Guido’s with me.’ No one answered.
Barefoot, dripping water across the floor as she walked, Flavia went to the living room, then into the rear of the apartment to check both bedrooms. When she came back, she had grown paler. Behind her, violins soared, trumpets pealed, and universal harmony was restored. ‘She’s not here, Guido. She’s gone.’
Chapter Twenty-One
AFTER FLAVIA slammed her way out of the apartment that afternoon, Brett sat and stared down at the pages of notes that covered the surface of her desk. She gazed down on charts that listed the burning temperatures of different types of wood, the sizes of the kilns unearthed in western China, the isotopes found in the glazes on tomb pottery from the same area, and an ecological reconstruction of the flora of that same area two thousand years ago. If she interpreted and combined the data one way, she got one result about the way the ceramics were fired, but if she arranged the variables in a different fashion, then her thesis was disproved, it was all nonsense, and she should have stayed in China, where she belonged.
That word led her to wonder if she would ever belong there again, if Flavia and Brunetti could somehow manage to fix all of this – she could think of no better term – so that she could continue to work. She pushed the papers back in disgust. There was no sense in finishing the article, not if the writer was soon to be discredited as having been an instrumental part of a major art fraud. She left the desk and went to stand in front of the rows of neatly organized compact discs, looking for music that would suit her current mood. Nothing vocal. Not those fat gits singing about love and loss. Love and loss. And surely not the harpsichord; the plunky sound of it would snap her nerves. All right, then, the Jupiter Symphony: if anything could prove to her that sanity, joy and love remained in the world, it was that.
She was convinced of sanity and joy and was beginning to believe again in love when the phone rang. She answered it only because she thought it might be Flavia, who had been gone more than an hour.
‘Pronto,’ she said, aware that this was the first time she had used the phone in almost a week.
‘Professoressa Lynch?’ a male voice enquired.
‘Yes.’
‘Friends of mine paid you a visit last week,’ the man said, voice well modulated and calm sounds elongated by the slurred undertones of a Sicilian accent. When Brett said nothing, he added, ‘I’m sure you remember.’
She still said nothing, her hand rigid on the telephone and her eyes closed with the memory of their visit.
‘Professoressa, I thought you might be interested to know that your friend,’ and his voice came down ironically on the word, ‘your friend Signora Petrelli, is talking to those same friends of mine. Yes, even as we speak, you and I, my friends are talking to her.’
‘What do you want?’ Brett asked.
&nbs
p; ‘Ah, I’d forgotten how very direct you Americans are. Why, I’d like to talk to you, Professoressa.’
After a long silence, Brett asked him, ‘About what?’
‘Oh, about Chinese art, of course, especially about some ceramics from the Han Dynasty that I think you might like to see. But before we do that, I think we should discuss Signora Petrelli.’
‘I don’t want to talk to you.’
‘I was afraid of that, Dottoressa. That’s why I took the liberty of asking Signora Petrelli to join me.’
Brett said the only thing she could think of to say. ‘She’s here with me.’
The man laughed outright. ‘Please, Dottoressa, I know just how bright you are, so please don’t be stupid with me. If she were there, you would have hung up the phone and would be calling the police right now, not talking to me.’ He allowed that to sink in and then asked, ‘Aren’t I right?’
‘How do I know she’s there with you?’
‘Ah, you don’t, Dottoressa. That’s part of the game, you see. But you know she’s not there, and you know she’s been gone since fourteen minutes after two, when she left your apartment and started towards Rialto. It’s a very unpleasant day to have gone for a walk. It’s raining very heavily. She should be back by now. In fact, if I might be so bold as to suggest it, she should have been back long before this, isn’t that right?’ When Brett didn’t answer him, he repeated, voice sterner, ‘Isn’t that right?’
‘What do you want?’ Brett asked tiredly.
‘That’s more like it. I want you to come and visit me, Dottoressa. I want you to come right now, to put on your coat and leave your apartment. Someone will be waiting for you downstairs, and he’ll bring you to me. As soon as you do that, Signora Petrelli will be free to leave.’
‘Where is she?’
‘You can’t expect me to tell you that, can you, Dottoressa?’ he asked with feigned astonishment. ‘Now, are you willing to do what I tell you?’