A Question of Belief

20

Brunetti might very easily have called the other tenants in the palazzo in which Fontana had lived to say the police needed to talk to them, but he knew surprise gave an interviewer an added advantage. He had no idea what these people would want to reveal to — or hide from — the police, but he preferred that he and Vianello should arrive unannounced.

The heat made it impossible for them to think of walking to the Misericordia, and there was no easy way to get there by vaporetto, so Brunetti had Foa take them in a police launch. He and Vianello stayed on deck: even with the windows open, the cabin of the slow-moving launch was unbearable. Foa had raised the awning above the tiller, but it did little to help against the sun. It was minimally cooler in the open air with the breeze, and perhaps being on the water helped, but it was still so hot that none of them could bear to mention it. The only relief they found were in the occasional patches of cool air through which they passed, a phenomenon Brunetti had never understood: perhaps it seeped out of the porte d’acque of the palazzi they passed, or perhaps some system of wind and air currents trapped pockets of cooler air at random places in the canals.

When they pulled up near the palazzo, Brunetti told Foa to go back to the Questura, remembering Patta’s morning swim. He said he’d call when they were finished or, if it took too much time, that he and Vianello would go somewhere for lunch and get back on their own.

The top bell on the panel beside the portone read ‘Fulgoni’. Brunetti rang it.

‘Chi e?’ a woman’s voice inquired.

‘Polizia, Signora,’ Brunetti answered. ‘We’d like to talk to you.’

‘All right,’ she said after only a moment’s hesitation and clicked open the entry door.

They expected the cooler air in the courtyard, and so it did not delight them the way the surprise pockets of cool air in the canals had. As they passed the place where Fontana had been killed, Brunetti noticed that the red and white tape remained, though the pavement had been wiped clean. There was still no sign of a statue.

They walked to the top floor. The door was ajar and a tall, broad-shouldered woman in her fifties stood in the doorway. Seeing her hair, Brunetti remembered having seen her on the street: it was dark as a raven’s wing, brushed back from her pale face in two aerodynamic waves that created the look of a helmet, no doubt kept in place by some sort of substance known to women and hairdressers. In contrast, her face was so pale it looked as though it had been brushed with rice powder, and she wore no makeup save a light pink lipstick. She wore a dark green blouse with frills hardly suited to a woman her size. The colour, too, was inopportune and clashed with her blue skirt. Brunetti could tell the clothing was expensive and might have looked good on a person with the right colouring, but neither blouse nor skirt was in any way flattering to Signora Fulgoni.

‘Signora Fulgoni?’ Brunetti asked, extending his hand.

She ignored it and stepped back to wave them both inside. She led them silently down a corridor and into a small sitting room with parquet floors, a small sofa and one easy chair. The bright covers of magazines looked up happily from a low table; one wall was lined with bookcases bearing books that looked as though they had been read. Light streamed into the room through striped linen curtains drawn back from three large windows, a sharp contrast with the obscurity of the Fontanas’ apartment, one floor below them. The walls were the palest of pale ivory: on one of them hung what looked like a series of Otto Dix prints; another held more than a dozen paintings that appeared all to be by the same hand: small abstracts that used only three colours — red, yellow, white — and that appeared to have been painted with a palette knife. Brunetti found them exciting and peaceful at the same time but had no idea how the artist had achieved this.

‘My husband paints,’ she said with careful neutrality, raising her hand to indicate the paintings and then continuing the gesture to show them the sofa. Brunetti was interested by her phrasing — not that her husband was a painter — and waited for the explanation. It came: ‘He’s a banker and paints when he can.’ She spoke with audible pride in a voice that was calm and exact and had a very pleasing, low timbre.

‘I see,’ Brunetti said, sinking down beside Vianello, who had taken a notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and was preparing to take notes. After thanking her for having agreed to speak to them, he said, ‘We’d like to confirm the time you and your husband came home the other night.’

‘Why is it necessary that you ask again?’ she sounded honestly confused rather than irritated. ‘We’ve already told those other officers.’

Easily, fluidly, Brunetti lied, smiling as he did so. ‘There was a discrepancy of half an hour in what the Lieutenant and one of the officers remembered your saying, Signora. Only for that.’

She thought for a moment before she answered. ‘It must have been five or ten minutes after midnight,’ she said. ‘We heard the midnight bells from La Madonna dell’Orto when we turned off from Strada Nuova, so however long it took to walk from there.’

‘And you saw nothing unusual when you got back here?’

‘No.’

Mildly, he asked, ‘Could you tell me where you’d been, Signora?’

She was surprised by the question, which suggested to Brunetti that Alvise had not bothered to ask. She gave a small smile and said, ‘After dinner, we tried to watch television, but it was too hot, and everything we looked at was too stupid, so we decided to go for a walk. Besides,’ she said, her voice softening, ‘it’s the only time, really, that a person can walk in the city without having to dodge the tourists.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Brunetti saw Vianello nod in agreement.

‘Indeed,’ said Brunetti with a complicit smile. He looked around the apartment, at the high ceilings and linen curtains, suddenly struck by how very attractive it was. ‘Could you tell me how long you’ve lived here, Signora?’

‘Five years,’ she answered with a smile, not unresponsive to the compliment implied in his glance.

‘How did you find such a lovely place?’

The temperature of her voice lowered and she said, ‘My husband knew someone who told him about it.’

‘I see. Thank you,’ Brunetti said, and then asked, ‘How long have Signora Fontana and her son lived here?’

She glanced at one of the paintings, one that was distinguished by the thickness of the swath of yellow across its middle, then back at Brunetti, and said, ‘I think three or four years.’ She did not smile, but her face softened, either because she had decided she liked Brunetti or, just as easily, because he had moved away from the question of how they had found their apartment.

‘Did you know either of them well?’

‘Oh, no, not more than the way one knows one’s neighbours,’ she said. ‘We’d meet on the stairs or coming into the courtyard.’

‘Did you ever visit either one of them in their apartment?’

‘Heavens no,’ she said, obviously shocked by the very possibility. ‘My husband’s a bank director.’

Brunetti nodded, quite as though this were the most normal response he had ever heard to such a question.

‘Has anyone in the building, perhaps someone in the neighbourhood, ever spoken to you about either of them?’

‘Signora Fontana and her son?’ she asked, as if they had been speaking of some other people.

‘Yes.’

She glanced aside to another painting, this one with two vertical slashes of red running through a field of white, and said, ‘No, not that I can remember.’ She gave a small motion of her lips that was perhaps meant to serve as a smile or was perhaps the result of looking at the painting.

‘I see,’ Brunetti said, deciding that to continue to speak to her was to continue to go nowhere. ‘Thank you for your time,’ he said in a terminal voice.

She stood in a single graceful motion, while both he and a visibly surprised Vianello had to push themselves up from the sofa by using the armrests.

At the door, pleasantries were kept to a minimum; as they started down the steps, they heard the door close