Acqua Alta

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Fine, fine. And Paola?’

  ‘Good, so are the kids. Look, Lele, I’d like to talk to you. Can you spare me some time this afternoon?’

  ‘Talk talk or police talk?’

  ‘Police talk, I’m afraid. Or I think it is.’

  ‘I’ll be at the gallery after three if you want to come over then. Until about five.’ From the background, Brunetti heard a hissing sound, a muttered, ‘Puttana Eva,’ and then Lele said, ‘Guido, I’ve got to go. The pasta’s boiling over.’ Brunetti barely had time to say goodbye before the phone went dead.

  If anyone would know about Semenzato’s reputation, it was Lele. Gabriele Cossato, painter, antiquarian, lover of beauty, was as much a part of Venice, it seemed, as were the four Moors, poised in eternal confabulation to the right of the basilica of San Marco. For as far back as Brunetti could remember, there had been Lele, and Lele had been a painter. When Brunetti remembered his childhood, he recalled Lele, a friend of his father, and he remembered the stories, told then even to him, for he was a boy and so was expected to understand, about Lele’s women, that endless succession of donne, signore, ragazze, with whom Lele would appear at the Brunettis’ table. The women were all gone now, forgotten in his love for his wife of many years, but his passion for the beauty of the city remained, that and his limitless familiarity with the art world and all it encompassed: antiquarians and dealers, museums and galleries.

  He decided to go home for lunch and then go to see Lele directly from there. But then he remembered that it was Tuesday, which meant that Paola would be having lunch with the members of her department at the university, and that in its turn meant that the children would eat with their grandparents, leaving him to cook and eat a meal alone. To avoid that, he went to a local trattoria and spent the meal thinking about what could be so important about a discussion between an archaeologist and a museum director that it had to be prevented with such violence.

  A little after three, he crossed the Accademia Bridge and cut left towards Campo San Vio and, beyond it, Lele’s gallery. The artist was there when he arrived, perched on a ladder, a torch in one hand, a pair of electrical clippers in the other, reaching into a spaghetti-like mass of electrical wires housed behind a wooden panel above the door to the back room of the gallery. Brunetti was so accustomed to seeing Lele in his three-piece pin-striped suits that, even though the painter was perched at the top of the ladder, his position seemed not at all incongruous. Looking down, Lele greeted him, ‘Ciao, Guido. Just a minute while I join these together.’ So saying, he laid the torch on the top of the ladder, peeled back the plastic covering of one wire, twisted the exposed part around a second wire, then took a thick roll of black tape from his back pocket and bound the two together. With the point of the clippers, he poked the wire back among the others that ran parallel to it. Then, looking down at Brunetti, he said, ‘Guido, go into the storeroom and throw the switch for the current.’

  Obedient, he went into the large storeroom on the right and stood for a moment at the door, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness.

  ‘Just on the left,’ Lele called.

  Turning, he saw the large electrical panel attached to the wall. He pulled the main circuit breaker down, and the storeroom was suddenly flooded with light. He waited again, this time for his eyes to adjust to the brightness, then went back into the main room of the gallery.

  Lele was already down from the ladder, the panel closed above him. ‘Hold the door,’ he said and walked towards Brunetti, carrying his ladder. He quickly stored it in the back room and emerged, brushing dust from his hands.

  ‘Pantegana,’ he explained, giving the Venetian name for rat, a word which, though it named them clearly – rat – still managed to make them, in the naming, somehow charming and domestic. ‘They come and eat the covering on the wires.’

  ‘Can’t you poison them?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Bah,’ Lele snorted. ‘They prefer the poison to the plastic. They thrive on it. I can’t even keep paintings in the storeroom any more; they come in and eat the canvas. Or the wood.’

  Brunetti looked automatically at the paintings hanging on the walls of the gallery, vividly coloured scenes of the city, alive with light and filled with Lele’s energy.

  ‘No, they’re safe. They’re too high up. But some day I expect to come in and find the little bastards have moved the ladder in the night and climbed up to eat them all.’ The fact that Lele laughed when he said this made him sound no less serious about it. He dropped the clippers and tape into a drawer and turned to Brunetti. ‘All right, what is this talk that might be police talk?’

  ‘Semenzato, at the museum, and the Chinese exhibition held there a few years ago,’ Brunetti explained.

  Lele grunted in acknowledgement of the request and moved across the room to stand under a wrought-iron candelabrum attached to the wall. He reached up and bent one of the leaf-shaped prongs a bit to the left, stepped back to examine it, then leaned forward to bend it a tiny bit more. Satisfied, he went back to Brunetti.

  ‘He’s been at the museum for about eight years, Semenzato, and he’s managed to organize a number of international shows. That means he’s got good connections with museums or their directors in foreign countries, knows a lot of people in lots of places.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Brunetti asked, voice neutral.

  ‘He’s a good administrator. He’s hired a number of excellent people and brought them to Venice. There are two restorers he all but stole from the Courtauld, and he’s done a lot to change the way the exhibitions are publicized.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed that.’ At times, Brunetti felt that Venice had been turned into a whore forced to choose between different johns: first the city was offered the face from a Phoenician glass earring, saw the poster reproduced a thousand times, then that was quickly replaced with a portrait by Titian, which in turn was driven out by Andy Warhol, himself then quickly banished by a Celtic silver deer as the museums covered every available surface in the city and vied endlessly for the attention and box office receipts of the passing tourists. What would come next, he wondered, Leonardo T-shirts? No, they already had them in Florence. He’d seen enough posters for art shows to last a lifetime in hell.

  ‘Do you know him?’ Brunetti asked, wondering if that was the reason for Lele’s uncharacteristic objectivity.

  ‘Oh, we’ve met a few times.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The museum has called me in a few times to ask about majolica pieces they were offered, if I thought they were genuine or not.’

  ‘And you met him then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you think of him personally?’

  ‘He seemed a very pleasant, competent man.’

  Brunetti had had enough. ‘Come on, Lele, this is unofficial. It’s me, Guido, asking you, not Commissario Brunetti. I want to know what you think of him.’

  Lele looked down at the surface of the desk that stood beside him, moved a ceramic bowl a few millimetres to the left, glanced up at Brunetti, and said, ‘I think his eyes are for sale.’

  ‘What?’ asked Brunetti, not understanding at all.

  ‘Like Berenson. You know, you become an expert on something, and then people come to you and ask you if a piece is genuine or not. And because you’ve spent years or perhaps even your entire life studying something, learning about a painter or a sculptor, they believe you when you say a piece is genuine. Or that it’s not.’

  Brunetti nodded. Italy was full of experts; some of them even knew what they were talking about. ‘Why Berenson?’

  ‘It seems he sold his eyes. Gallery owners or private collectors would ask him to authenticate certain pieces, and sometimes he’d say that they were genuine, but later they’d turn out not to be.’ Brunetti started to ask a question, but Lele cut him off. ‘No, don’t even ask if it could have been an honest mistake. There’s proof that he was paid, especially by Duveen, that he
got a share of the take. Duveen had a lot of rich American clients; you know the type. They can’t be bothered learning about art, probably don’t even like it much, but they want to be known to have it, to own it. So Duveen matched their desire and their money with Berenson’s reputation and expertise, and everyone was happy; the Americans with their paintings, all with clear attributions; Duveen with the profits from the sales; and Berenson with both his reputation and his cut of the take.’

  Brunetti paused a moment before he asked, ‘And Semenzato does the same?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But of the last four pieces they brought me in to take a look at, two were imitations.’ He thought for a moment, then added, grudgingly, ‘Good imitations, but still imitations.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  Lele looked at him as though Brunetti had asked him how he knew a particular flower was a rose and not an iris. ‘I looked at them,’ he said simply.

  ‘Did you convince them?’

  Lele weighed for a moment whether to be offended by the question or not, but then he remembered that Brunetti was, after all, only a policeman. ‘The curators decided not to acquire the pieces.’

  ‘Who had decided, originally, to buy them?’ But he knew the answer.

  ‘Semenzato.’

  ‘And who was offering to sell them?’

  ‘We were never told. Semenzato said it was a private sale, that he had been contacted by a private dealer who wanted to sell the pieces, two plates that were supposed to be Florentine, fourteenth century, and two Venetian. Those two were genuine.’

  ‘All from the same source?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Could they have been stolen?’ Brunetti asked.

  Lele considered this for a while before he answered. ‘Perhaps. But major pieces like that, if they’re genuine, people know about them. There’s a record of sales, and people who know majolica have a pretty good idea of who owns the best pieces and when they’re sold. But that’s not an issue with the Florentine pieces. They were fakes.’

  ‘What was Semenzato’s reaction when you said they were?’

  ‘Oh, he said that he was very glad I’d discovered it and saved the museum from an embarrassing acquisition. That’s what he called it, “an embarrassing acquisition”, as though it was perfectly all right for the dealer to try to sell pieces that were frauds.’

  ‘Did you say any of this to him?’ Brunetti asked.

  Lele shrugged, a gesture that summed up centuries, perhaps millennia, of survival. ‘I didn’t have the feeling that he wanted to hear anything like that.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘He said he’d return them to the dealer and tell him that the museum wasn’t interested in those two pieces.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘The museum went ahead and bought them.’

  ‘From the same dealer?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Did you ask who it was?’

  That question earned Brunetti another of those looks. ‘You can’t ask that,’ Lele explained.

  Brunetti had known Lele all his life, so he asked, ‘Did the curators tell you who he was?’

  Lele laughed in open delight at having his high-minded pose so easily shattered. ‘I asked one of them, but they had no idea. Semenzato never mentioned the name.’

  ‘How did he know the seller wouldn’t try to sell the ones you didn’t buy again, to another museum or to a private collector?’

  Lele smiled his crooked smile, one side of his mouth turning down, the other up, a smile Brunetti had always thought best expressed the Italian character, never quite sure of gloom or glee and always ready to switch from one to the other. ‘I saw no point in mentioning it to him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s always struck me as the kind of man who doesn’t like to be questioned or given advice.’

  ‘But you were called in to look at the plates.’

  Again, that grin. ‘By the curators. That’s why I said he didn’t like to be given advice. He didn’t like it that I said they weren’t genuine. He was gracious and he thanked me for my help, said the museum was grateful. But he still didn’t like it.’

  ‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Very,’ Lele agreed, ‘especially from a man whose job is to protect the integrity of the museum’s collection. And,’ he added, ‘to see that fakes don’t remain on the market.’ He moved in front of Brunetti and crossed the room to straighten a painting hanging on the far wall.

  ‘Is there anything else I should know about him?’ Brunetti asked.

  Facing away from Brunetti, looking at his own painting, Lele replied, ‘I think there’s probably a lot more you should know about him.’

  ‘Such as?’ he asked.

  Lele came back towards him and studied the picture from the greater distance. He seemed pleased with whatever correction he had made. ‘Nothing specific. His reputation is very high in the city, and he has a lot of friends in high places.’

  ‘Then what do you mean?’

  ‘Guido, ours is a small world,’ Lele began and then stopped.

  ‘Do you mean Venice or those of you who work with antiques?’

  ‘Both, but especially us. There are only about five or ten of us in the city who really count: my brother, Bortoluzzi, Ravanello. And most of what we do is done by suggestions and hints so subtle that no one else would understand what was happening.’ He saw that Brunetti didn’t understand this, so he tried to explain. ‘Last week, someone showed me a polychrome Madonna with the Christ Child lying asleep in her lap. She was perfect fifteenth century. Tuscan. Perhaps even the end of the fourteenth century. But the dealer who showed it to me picked up the baby – they were carved in separate pieces – and pointed to a place on the back of the statue, just below the shoulder, where the faintest of patches could be seen.’ He waited for Brunetti’s response.

  When that didn’t come, he continued. ‘That meant it was an angel, not a Christ Child. The patch covered the place where the wings had been, where they had been taken out, who knows when, and covered up so that it would look like a Christ Child.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because there have always been more angels than Christs. So the removal of the wings . . .’ Lele’s voice trailed off.

  ‘Gave him a promotion?’ Brunetti asked, understanding.

  Lele’s shout of laughter filled the gallery. ‘Yes, that’s it. He was promoted to Christ, and the promotion meant he’d earn a lot more money when he was sold.’

  ‘But the dealer showed you?’

  ‘That’s what I’m getting at, Guido. He told me by not telling me, just by showing me that tiny patch, and he would have done the same with any one of us.’

  ‘But not a casual client?’ Brunetti suggested.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Lele agreed. ‘The patch was so well done, and the paint covered it so perfectly, that very few people would have noticed it. Or if they had noticed it, would not have known what it meant.’

  ‘Would you have?’

  Lele nodded quickly. ‘Eventually, yes, I would have noticed it, if I had taken it home and lived with it.’

  ‘But not the casual buyer?’

  ‘No, probably not.’

  ‘Then why did he show you?’

  ‘Because he thought I might still like to buy the piece. And because it’s important to us to know that, at least among ourselves, we won’t lie or cheat or try to pass something off as what we know it isn’t.’

  ‘Is there a moral in all of this, Lele?’ Brunetti asked with a smile. Since his childhood, there had often been a lesson hidden in what Lele had told him.

  ‘I’m not sure if it’s a moral, Guido, but Semenzato is not a member of the club. He isn’t one of us.’

  ‘And who made that decision, he or you?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone ever really decided it. And I’ve certainly never heard anything about him directly.’ Lele, a man of images and not of words, looked o
ut of the wide gallery window and studied the patterns of light on the canal beyond. ‘It’s more a question that he was never assumed to be one of us than that he was consciously excluded.’

  ‘Who else knows this?’

  ‘You’re the first person I’ve told about the majolica. And I’m not sure that anyone can be said to “know” this, at least not at any level he’d be aware of. It’s just something that we all understand.’

  ‘About him?’

  With a laugh, Lele said, ‘About most of the antique dealers in the country, if you want the truth.’ Then, more soberly, he added, ‘And, yes, about him, too.’

  ‘Not the best recommendation for the director of one of the leading museums in Italy, is it?’ Brunetti asked. ‘It would make a person reluctant to buy a polychrome Madonna from him.’

  With another loud burst of laughter, Lele said, ‘You should meet some of the others. I wouldn’t buy a plastic hairbrush from most of them.’ Both laughed at that for a moment, but then Lele asked, serious now, ‘Why are you interested in him?’

  Part of Brunetti’s sworn trust as an officer of the law was never to reveal police information to anyone unauthorized to hear it. ‘Someone doesn’t want him to talk about the China exhibition, the one held here five years ago.’

  ‘Um?’ Lele murmured, asking for more information.

  ‘The person who arranged the show had an appointment to see him, but she was beaten, badly beaten, and told not to keep it.’

  ‘Dottoressa Lynch?’ Lele asked.

  Brunetti nodded.

  ‘Have you spoken to Semenzato?’ Lele asked.

  ‘No. I don’t want to call any attention to him. Let whoever did this believe the warning worked.’

  Lele nodded and rubbed his hand lightly across his lips, something he always did when trying to work out a problem.

  ‘Could you ask around, Lele? See if there’s any talk about him?’

  ‘What kind of talk?’

  ‘I don’t know. Debts, perhaps. Women. Whether you can get an idea of who that dealer was, or any other people he might know who are involved in . . .’ He trailed off, not sure what to name it.