‘No, she’d owned it for more than ten years before she sold it to him.’
‘The declared price?’
‘One hundred and fifty thousand euros,’ she answered. Then before he could say anything, she added, ‘It’s probably worth more than ten times that today.’
‘And was worth at least three times that when he bought it,’ Brunetti commented neutrally. Then, more to the point, ‘It’s interesting that no one in the tax office questioned that price: it’s so obviously false.’
She shrugged this away. A man as powerful and rich as Cuccetti had probably got away with much worse things during his life, and to whom should the tax office do a favour if not to Avvocato Cuccetti?
Vianello appeared at the door. ‘Signorina, the Vice-Questore would like to speak to you.’
None of the three of them wondered why Patta had not simply used the telephone. This way, all of them would take note, the Vice-Questore could send Vianello on an errand upstairs, force Signorina Elettra to stop whatever she was doing and come to his office, and make clear to Brunetti who it was she worked for, and to whom her loyalty was meant to be given.
She left and Vianello, unasked, came and sat in front of Brunetti’s desk.
‘I’ve had a look in the law books,’ Brunetti said, using his thumb to point to the bookcase behind him, which held volumes of both civil and criminal law. ‘And the statute of limitations expired years ago.’
‘For what?’
‘Falsification of an official document. In this case, a will.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Vianello said with heavy emphasis on the first word.
‘Meaning?’
‘That if I didn’t know it, then it’s unlikely that someone like Morandi would know it, don’t you think?’
‘And that means?’
Vianello crossed his legs and folded his arms, slumped down in the chair, and said, speaking so slowly that Brunetti could almost hear the Inspector fitting the pieces together as he spoke, ‘And that means that one way to put these things together is to assume that Signora Sartori said something to Signora Altavilla about whatever it was she and Morandi did. About the will, that is.’
Brunetti interrupted him to ask, ‘That they knew it was false when they witnessed it?’
‘Perhaps,’ Vianello said.
‘Madre Rosa referred to her “terrible honesty”. Something like that,’ Brunetti said, failing to recall the precise phrase, though its strangeness had struck him when she said it. ‘So if Signora Altavilla learned something from Signora Sartori, she might have been capable of confronting Morandi with it.’
‘Because she’d want him to confess?’ Vianello asked.
Brunetti considered this for some time before he answered. ‘I thought about that. But to what purpose? The old woman’s dead, Cuccetti and his wife and son are dead. The estate’s disappeared: the Church has whatever was left.’ Then he added, with a shrug of incomprehension, ‘Maybe she believed it would save his reputation, or his conscience.’ After a moment, he added, ‘Or save his soul.’ Who knew, people believed even stranger things.
‘Morandi’s not the sort of man who’d worry about his conscience,’ Vianello said abruptly. ‘Or his reputation.’ The Inspector chose not to comment on the third.
‘You’d be surprised.’
‘At what?’
‘At how important their reputation can be to the people we’d least expect to give it a thought.’
‘But he’s a man with no education, with a long criminal record, a known thief,’ Vianello said, making no attempt to disguise his astonishment.
‘You could be describing many of the men in Parliament,’ Brunetti said in return, intending it as a joke but then suddenly oppressed by the truth of it. But beyond the joke, Brunetti had struck on a truth, and he knew it: even the worst men wanted to be perceived as better than they were. How else could hypocrisy have risen to such delirious levels?
He thought back to his meeting with Morandi. The old man had been surprised to find him there and had reacted instinctively. But as soon as he realized that Brunetti was a representative of the state, there in performance of his duty – which duty he believed was to help Signora Sartori – his manner had softened. Brunetti thought of his own violent father: even at his worst, he had always remained deferential to authority and to those whose good opinion he valued. And he had always treated his wife with respect and strived to have hers. How slowly these old forms disappeared.
Vianello pulled him back from these thoughts by saying, though he said it grudgingly, ‘Maybe you’re right.’
‘About?’
‘That people’s good opinion would be important to him. You said he was protective of the woman?’
‘It seemed so.’
‘Protective because he didn’t want her to talk to you or because he didn’t want you to trouble her?’
Brunetti had to think about this for a moment before he answered, ‘I’d say a bit of both, but more the second than the first.’
‘Why would that be?’
‘Because he loves her,’ Brunetti said, remembering the way the old man looked at her. ‘That would be the obvious reason.’ Before Vianello could comment or object, Brunetti said, ‘One of the things Paola once told me is how prone we are to scorn the emotions of simple people. As if ours were better somehow.’
‘And love is love?’ Vianello enquired.
‘I think so, yes.’ Brunetti had still to fight against his reluctance to believe this wholeheartedly, as Paola seemed to do. He thought of it as one of his essential failures of humanity.
Then, changing tack entirely, Brunetti asked, ‘So where’s the money coming from?’ Seeing Vianello’s surprise, he said, ‘The money that’s going into the account.’
‘Beats me. It’s unlikely he’s selling drugs,’ Vianello said, meaning it as a joke.
‘But at more than eighty, it’s got to be that he’s selling something; he’s certainly not going around breaking into houses, and he’s too old to work,’ Brunetti said. In response to Vianello’s glance, he said, ‘And since Cuccetti’s dead, and all his family, and everything’s gone to the Church, there’s no one he can be blackmailing.’
Vianello smiled and could not resist saying, ‘I’m always cheered by your uplifting view of human nature, Guido.’
Was rhetorical style contagious? Brunetti wondered. A decade ago, Vianello would not have been capable of a verbal flourish such as this. Brunetti was pleased at the thought.
‘So he’s selling something,’ Brunetti went on as though the Ispettore had not spoken. ‘And if that’s so, and if he’s not stealing things from the docks any more, then it might be something they gave him when they signed the will or when he got the apartment from them.’
‘Or something he stole,’ Vianello added, as though he too had something to contribute to the view of human nature.
This possibility left Brunetti uncomfortable. ‘He met her when he went to work at the hospital, and he had no more trouble with us after that.’
‘Or he didn’t get caught.’
‘He’s not very bright, so he would have been caught,’ Brunetti insisted. ‘Look how many times he was arrested before that.’
‘But he always got out of it. He could have threatened his way out.’
‘If he was really violent, or dangerous, it would be in the files,’ Brunetti said. ‘We’d know.’
Vianello considered this and finally nodded in agreement. ‘It’s possible. I’ve known love to do stranger things to people than to make them careful.’
‘Or make them better,’ Brunetti amended.
‘You make him sound like Saint Paul,’ Vianello said, sounding amused at the unlikelihood. ‘He’s riding along on his way to steal an X-ray machine from the hospital, sees Signorina Sartori in her white nurse’s uniform; he falls to the ground at the sight of her, and when he gets to his feet, he’s a man transformed?’
Perhaps he had had enough of Vianello’s rhetorical flights. ‘Are you a better man since you married Nadia?’ he surprised Vianello by asking.
