‘What’s going on?’
He looked towards Brunetti, and they recognized one another instantly. Giancarlo Santomauro was not only one of the best known lawyers in Venice, often serving as legal counsel to the Patriarch at no cost, but he was also the president and moving light of the Lega della Moralita, a society of lay Christians dedicated to the ‘preservation and perpetuation of faith, home, and virtue’.
Brunetti did no more than nod. If by any chance these men didn’t know the identity of Crespo’s client, it was better for the lawyer that it remain that way.
‘What are you doing here?’ Santomauro demanded angrily. He turned to the older of the two men, now standing above Crespo, who had ended on a sofa, both hands over his face, sobbing. ‘Can’t you shut him up?’ Santomauro shouted. Brunetti watched as the older man bent over Crespo. He said something to him, then put both hands on his shoulders and shook him till his head wove back and forth. Crespo stopped crying, but his hands remained over his face.
‘What are you doing in this apartment, Commissario? I’m Signor Crespo’s legal representative, and I refuse to permit the police to continue to brutalize him.’
Brunetti didn’t answer but continued to study the pair at the sofa. The older man moved to sit beside Crespo and put a protective arm around his shoulders, and Crespo gradually grew quiet.
‘I asked you a question, Commissario,’ Santomauro said.
‘I came to ask Signor Crespo if he could help us identify the victim of a crime. I showed him a photo of the man. You see his response. Rather strong way to respond to the death of a man he didn’t recognize, wouldn’t you say?’
The man in the sweater looked at Brunetti but it was Santomauro who spoke. ‘If Signor Crespo has said he didn’t recognize him, then you have your answer and can leave.’
‘Of course,’ Brunetti said, tucking the folder under his right arm and taking a step towards the door. Glancing back at Santomauro, voice easy and conversational, Brunetti said, ‘You forgot to tie your shoes, Avvocato.’
Santomauro looked down and saw immediately that they were both tied neatly. He gave Brunetti a look that would have etched glass but said nothing.
Brunetti stopped in front of the sofa and looked down at Crespo. ‘My name is Brunetti,’ he said. ‘If you remember anything, you can call me at the Questura in Venice.’
Santomauro started to speak but cut himself short. Brunetti let himself out of the apartment.
Chapter Nine
The rest of the day was no more productive, neither for Brunetti nor for the two other policemen working their way down the list. When they met back at the Questura late in the afternoon, Gallo reported that three of the men on his part of the list said they had no idea of who the man was. They were probably telling the truth, two others weren’t home, and another said he thought the man looked familiar but couldn’t remember why or how. Scarpa’s experience had been much the same; all of the men he spoke to were sure they had never seen the dead man.
They agreed that they would try the same approach the next day, trying to finish up the names on the list. Brunetti asked Gallo to prepare a second list of the female whores who worked both out by the factories and on Via Cappuccina. Though he didn’t have much hope that these women would help, there was always the possibility that they had paid attention to the competition and would recognize the man.
As Brunetti climbed the steps to his apartment, he fantasized about what would happen when he opened the door. Magically, elves would have come in during the day and air-conditioned the entire place; others would have installed one of those showers he had seen only in brochures from spas and on American soap operas: twenty different shower heads would direct needle-thin streams of scented water at his body, and when he finished with the shower, he would wrap himself in a thick towel of imperial size. And then there would be a bar, perhaps the sort set at the end of a swimming pool, and a white-jacketed barman would offer him a long, cool drink with a hibiscus floating on its surface. His immediate physical needs attended to, he passed to science fiction and conjured up two children both dutiful and obedient and a devoted wife who would tell him, the instant he opened the door, that the case had been solved and they were all free to leave for vacation the following morning.
Reality, as is ever its wont, was discovered to be somewhat different. His family had retreated to the terrace which was filled with the first cool of early evening. Chiara looked up from her book, said ‘
‘Guido, go take a shower, and I’ll get you something to drink.’ A bell pealed out, somewhere to the left of them, Raffi flipped a page, and Brunetti reached up to loosen his tie.
‘Put a hibiscus in it,’ he said and turned to go take his shower.
Twenty minutes later, he sat, dressed in loose cotton pants and a linen shirt, with his bare feet up on the railing of the terrace, and told Paola about the day. The children had disappeared, no doubt off in pursuit of some dutiful and obedient activity.
‘Santomauro?’ she asked. ‘Giancarlo Santomauro?’
‘The very one.’
‘How delicious,’ she said, voice rich with real delight. ‘I wish I’d never had to promise you I wouldn’t talk about what you tell me; this one is wonderful.’ And she repeated Santomauro’s name.
‘You don’t tell people, do you, Paola?’ he asked, though he knew he shouldn’t.
She started to shoot back an angry answer, but then she leaned over and put her hand on his knee. ‘No, Guido. I’ve never repeated anything. And never will.’
‘I’m sorry I asked,’ he said, looking down and sipping at his Campari soda.
‘Do you know his wife?’ she asked, veering back to the original topic.
‘I think I was introduced to her once, at a concert somewhere, a couple of years ago. But I don’t think I’d remember her if I saw her again. What’s she like?’
Paola sipped at her drink, then placed the glass on the top of the railing, something she was repeatedly forbidding the children to do. ‘Well,’ she began, considering how most acidly to answer the question. ‘If I were Signor, no, Avvocato Santomauro and I were given the choice between my tall, thin, impeccably well-dressed wife, she of the Margaret Thatcher
‘How do you know her?’ Brunetti asked, as ever ignoring the rhetoric and attending to the substance.
‘She’s a client of Biba’s,’ she said, naming a friend of hers who was a jeweller. ‘I’ve met her a few times in the shop, and then I met them at my parents’ place at one of those dinners you didn’t go to.’ Figuring that this was a way of getting back at him for having asked if she told people what he said to her, Brunetti let it pass.
‘What are they like together?’
‘She does all the talking, and he just stands around and glowers, as if there were nothing and no one within a radius of ten kilometres who could ever possibly measure up to his high standards. I always thought they were a pair of sanctimonious, self-important bigots. All I had to do was listen to her talk for five minutes, and I knew it: she’s like a minor character in a Dickens novel, one of the pious, malevolent ones. Because she did all the talking, I was never sure about him, had to go on instinct, but I’m very pleased to learn that I was right.’
‘Paola,’ he cautioned, ‘I have no reason to believe he was there for any other reason than to give Crespo legal advice.’
‘And he had to take his shoes off to do that?’ she asked with a snort of disbelief. ‘Guido, please come back to this century, all right? Avvocato Santomauro was there for one reason only, and it had nothing to do with his profession, not unless he has worked out a very interesting payment plan for Signor Crespo.’
Paola, he had learned over the course of more than two decades, had the tendency to Go Too Far. He was uncertain, even after all this time, whether this was a vice or a virtue, but there was no doubt that it was an irremovable part of her character. She even got a certain wild look in her eye when she was planning to Go Too Far,
