you realized you had dropped your sweater, and that you then went out for about half an hour and came back with it.’
‘I see,’ Fulgoni said. Looking directly at Brunetti, he asked, ‘And do you think this would have been enough time for me to go downstairs and kill Fontana? To have beaten his head in against that statue?’
With no hesitation, Brunetti said, ‘Yes,’ and added, ‘There would have been time enough.’
‘But that doesn’t mean I did it?’ Fulgoni asked.
‘Until there is a motive, your killing him would make no sense,’ Brunetti answered.
‘Of course,’ Fulgoni said, ‘and how — what’s the English word, “sporting?” of you to tell me.’
Brunetti was more surprised by the sentiment than by Fulgoni’s use of the word.
‘Would those samples you say you’ve found supply a motive?’ Fulgoni asked.
‘Yes, they would,’ Brunetti answered, intensely conscious of Fulgoni’s phrasing: ‘you say you’ve found’.
Fulgoni startled Brunetti by getting suddenly to his feet. ‘I think I don’t want to be in the bank any more, Commissario.’
Brunetti rose but remained silent.
‘Why don’t we go to my home and have a look, then?’ Fulgoni suggested.
‘If you think that will help things,’ Brunetti said, though he had no idea, not really, of what he meant by that.
Fulgoni reached for his phone and asked that a taxi be called for him.
The two men stood side by side on the deck, not speaking, as the taxi carried them up the Grand Canal and under the Rialto. The day was sun-bright, but the breeze on the water kept them from feeling the heat. In Brunetti’s experience, tension drove most people to talk, and the tension that filled Fulgoni was easily read in the white of his knuckles as he grasped the taxi’s railing. But anger just as often kept them silent as they used their energy to run over the past, perhaps seeking the place or time where things went wrong or flew out of control.
The taxi pulled up at the same place Foa had used the day the body was discovered. Fulgoni paid the driver and added a generous tip, then stepped on to the embankment. He turned to see if Brunetti needed a hand, but he was already beside him.
Still not speaking, they walked down the embankment and over the bridge. They stopped at the
Fulgoni led the way to the storeroom that held the birdcages and drew up sharp in front of the padlocked chain. ‘I assume it’s there that you found your samples?’ he asked, pointing inside.
Brunetti had thought to get the keys from the evidence room and pulled them from his pocket. He fitted the various keys in the lock until he found the right one, removed the lock and opened the door. It was almost noon, so the sun beat down squarely upon them and cast no light into the storeroom. Fulgoni reached inside and switched on the light.
Ignoring the birdcages, he walked straight to the boxes piled beside them. Brunetti watched as he read the labels, though his body blocked Brunetti from reading them. At last he reached up and slid one out, creating a small avalanche as the boxes above it collapsed to fill the space. He placed it on a small round table with a scratched surface that Brunetti had overlooked. Fulgoni picked at the tape, dry and difficult to remove, that sealed the box and pulled it loose in a single long strip. Turning to Brunetti, he said, ‘Perhaps you’d like to open it, Commissario.’
He moved past Fulgoni and pulled back the first flaps, then the next two. A grey turtleneck sweater lay on the top.
‘I think you have to look deeper, Commissario,’ Fulgoni said and then gave a dry laugh in which there was no humour whatsoever.
Brunetti folded back the sweater; beneath it was a thick blue sweater with a zipper. And beneath that was a light green V-neck sweater. ‘Yes, look at the label,’ Fulgoni said at the same instant Brunetti’s eyes fell upon the Jaeger tag.
Brunetti let the other sweaters fall back into place and closed the flaps of the box. He turned to Fulgoni and said, ‘Does this mean you did not go out in search of your sweater?’
‘This box was packed at the end of winter, Commissario,’ Fulgoni said. ‘So, no, I wasn’t wearing it, and I did not drop it. And so I did not go out in search of it.’ He placed the sweater carelessly on top of the pile of boxes, then bent to pick up the dry strip of tape from the floor.
Keeping his eyes on the brown tape as he wrapped it around two fingers, he said, ‘My wife doesn’t like mess. Or disorder.’ He slipped the paper cylinder into his pocket, looked at Brunetti and said, ‘I’ve always tried to respect her wishes.’ He nodded towards the birdcages and said, ‘That’s proof that I did, I suppose. We didn’t have children, so one year she decided that she wanted birds. She filled the house with them.’ He waved a magician’s arm over the empty cages. ‘But they died or they grew sick, so we gave them away. Well, the ones that weren’t sick.’
‘And those that were?’ Brunetti asked, as he felt he was being asked to do.
‘My wife disposed of them when they died,’ Fulgoni said. He turned to Brunetti. ‘I’ve always been far more sentimental than my wife, so I wanted to bury them over on the other side of the courtyard, under the palms.’ He made a vague gesture beyond the door of the storeroom. ‘But she put them in plastic bags and had the garbage man take them away.’
‘But you kept the cages?’ Brunetti said.
Fulgoni ran his eye over the stacks of wooden bird houses and said, puzzled by it, ‘Yes, we did, didn’t we? I wonder why that was?’
Brunetti knew this was a question not in search of an answer.
‘Maybe my wife likes cages,’ Fulgoni said with a desolate smile. ‘I’d never thought of it that way.’ He walked over and pulled the grated door of the storeroom towards them until it closed and then stood for a moment with his hands holding two of the upright bars, looking out at the courtyard. Then he turned to face Brunetti and asked, ‘But which side is the cage, do you think, Commissario? In here or out there?’
Brunetti was a man of infinite patience, so simply stood and waited for Fulgoni to speak again. He had seen this moment many times before and had come to think of it as a kind of unravelling or unhinging, when a person decides that things have to be made clear, if only to himself.
Fulgoni put the tips of the fingers of his right hand on his lips, as if to give evidence of how deep in thought he was. When he removed his fingers, his lips and the area around them were stained a dark brown; Brunetti’s eyes fled to Fulgoni’s hands, but he saw there only the rust from the bars, not Fontana’s blood.
Brunetti closed his eyes, suddenly aware of the heat of this cage in which the two of them were trapped.
‘I’d like to show you something, Commissario,’ Fulgoni said in an entirely normal voice. When Brunetti looked at him, he saw that the banker was wiping his hands with the handkerchief from his jacket pocket. Brunetti was struck by the way his hands grew cleaner without making the handkerchief darker.
Fulgoni moved past Brunetti and returned to where the cages were stacked. He studied them for a moment, then leaned down to examine one on the bottom row. He bent and put his hands on either side of it and started to wiggle it back and forth, working it free from the other cages trapping it.
He yanked it out, and the cages imitated the boxes by collapsing into the space where it had been, landing askew.
Fulgoni carried the cage to the table and set it beside the box. ‘Have a look, Commissario,’ he said, stepping back to remove his shadow, which the light cast across the cage.
Brunetti bent to study it: he saw a wooden birdcage, thin ribs of bamboo, the classic ‘Made in China’ construction. On the bottom, instead of newspaper, lay a piece of red cloth. It seemed to be woven of light cotton, and near the back Brunetti could see a separate piece: could it be a sleeve? Yes, that was it, a sleeve, and there was the collar, right at the back. A sweater then, a red cotton sweater, summer weight. Fulgoni stood beside him, motionless and silent, so Brunetti returned his attention to the cloth, puzzled that the other man should want him to look at it. Just below the neck there appeared a figure, or at least a change in colour. Darker than the rest of the sweater, it was amorphous: a flower, perhaps? One of those big things like a peony? An anemone?
There, on the top of the sleeve, was another flower, this one smaller and darker. Drier.
Brunetti reached to open the door of the cage but before he could, Fulgoni put a hand on his arm, saying, ‘Don’t touch it, Commissario. I don’t think you want to contaminate the evidence.’ There was no trace of sarcasm in his voice, only concern.
Brunetti looked at the sweater for a long time before he asked, ‘How careful were you when you put it in
