Anonymous Venetian aka Dressed for Death

that dress were not the sort of thing a middle-aged banker wore to the office.

Chapter Thirteen

If Brunetti thought he was going to find people working on a Saturday morning in August, the staff of the Questura thought otherwise: there were guards at the door, even a cleaning woman on the stairs, but the offices were empty, and he knew there was no hope of getting anything done until Monday morning. For a moment, he thought of getting on a train to Bolzano, but he knew it would be after dinner before he got there, just as he knew he would spend all the next day eager to be back in the city.

He let himself into his office and opened the windows, though he was aware there was no good to be done by that. The room became more humid, perhaps even minimally hotter. No new papers lay on his desk, no report from Signorina Elettra.

He reached down into his bottom drawer and pulled out the telephone book. He flipped it open and turned to the L’s, but there was no listing for Lega della Moralita, though that didn’t surprise him. Under the S’s, he found Santomauro, Giancarlo, aw. and an address in S. Marco. The late Leonardo Mascari, he learned by using the same system, lived in Castello. This surprised him: Castello was the least prestigious sestiere of the city, a zone primarily inhabited by solid working-class families, an area where children could still grow up speaking nothing but dialect and remain entirely ignorant of Italian until they began elementary school. Perhaps it was the Mascari family home. Or perhaps he had made a lucky deal on an apartment or house. Apartments in Venice were so hard to find, and those found so outrageously priced, either to buy or to rent, that even Castello was becoming fashionable. Spending enough money on restoration could perhaps provide respectability, if not for the entire quartiere, then at least for the individual address.

He checked the listings in the yellow pages for banks, and found that the Bank of Verona was listed in Campo San Bartolomeo, the narrow campo at the foot of the Rialto where many banks had their offices; this surprised him, for he could not remember ever having seen it. More out of curiosity than anything else, he dialled the number. The phone was picked up on the third ring, and a man’s voice said, ‘Si?’ as though he were expecting a call.

‘Is this the Bank of Verona?’ Brunetti asked.

There was a moment’s pause, and then the man said, ‘I’m sorry, you’ve reached a wrong number.’

‘Sorry to trouble you,’ Brunetti said.

The other man replaced the phone without saying anything else.

The vagaries of SIP, the national telephone service, were such that having reached a wrong number would strike no one as in any way strange, but Brunetti was certain he had dialled the number correctly. He dialled the number again, but this time it rang unanswered twelve times before Brunetti replaced the receiver. He looked at the listing again and made a note of the address. Then he checked the phone book for Morelli’s pharmacy. The addresses were only a few numbers apart. He tossed the phone book back into the drawer and kicked it shut. He closed the windows, went downstairs, and left the Questura.

Ten minutes later, he walked out from the sottoportico of Calle della Bissa and into Campo San Bartolomeo. His eyes went up to the bronze statue of Goldoni, perhaps not his favourite playwright, but certainly the one who could make him laugh the hardest, especially when the plays were presented in their original Veneziano dialect, as they always were here, in the city that swarmed to his plays and loved him enough to put up this statue. Goldoni was in full stride, which made this campo the perfect place for him to be, for here, everyone rushed, always on their way somewhere: across the Rialto Bridge to go to the vegetable market; from Rialto to either the San Marco or the Cannaregio district. If people lived anywhere near the heart of the city, its geography would pull them through San Bartolomeo at least once a day.

When Brunetti got there, foot traffic was at its height as people rushed to the market before it closed, or they hurried home from work, the week finally over. Casually, he walked along the east side of the campo, looking at the numbers painted above the doors. As he had expected, the number was painted above an entrance-way two doors to the right of the pharmacy. He stood for a moment in front of the panel of bells beside the door and studied the names. The Bank of Verona was listed, as were three other names with bells beside them, probably private apartments.

Brunetti rang the first bell above the bank. There was no answer. The same happened with the second. He was about to ring the top bell when he heard a woman’s voice behind him, asking in purest Veneziano, ‘May I help you? Are you looking for someone who lives here?’

He turned away from the bells and found himself looking down at a small old woman with an enormous shopping trolley leaning against her leg. Remembering the name on the first bell, he said, answering in the same dialect, ‘Yes, I’m here to see the Montinis. It’s time for them to renew their insurance policy, and I thought I’d stop by and see if they wanted to make any changes on the coverage.’

‘They’re not here,’ she said, looking into an enormous handbag, hunting for her keys. ‘Gone to the mountains. Same with the Gasparis, except they’re at Jesolo.’ Abandoning her hope of touching or seeing the keys, she took the bag and shook it, bent on locating them by sound. It worked, and she pulled out a bunch of keys as large as her hand.

‘That’s what all this is,’ she said, holding the keys up to Brunetti. ‘They’ve left me their keys, and I go in and water the plants, see the place doesn’t fall down.’ She looked up from the keys and at Brunetti’s face. Her eyes were a faded pale-blue, set in a round face covered with a tracery of fine lines. ‘Do you have children, Signore?’

‘Yes, I do,’ he responded immediately.

‘Names and ages?’

‘Raffaele’s sixteen, and Chiara’s thirteen, Signora.’

‘Good,’ she said, as though he had passed some sort of test. ‘You’re a strong young man. Do you think you could carry that cart up to the third floor for me? If you don’t, then I’ll have to make at least three trips to get it all up there. My son and his family are coming to lunch tomorrow, so I’ve had to get a lot of things.’

‘I’d be very glad to help you, Signora,’ he said, bending down to pick up the cart, which must have weighed fifteen kilos. ‘Is it a big family?’

‘My son and his wife and their children. Two of them are bringing the great-grandchildren, so there’ll be, let’s see, there’ll be ten of us.’

She opened the door and held it open while Brunetti slipped past her with the cart. She pushed on the timed light and started up the steps ahead of him. ‘You wouldn’t believe what they charged me for peaches. Middle of August, and they’re still charging three thousand lire a kilo. But I got them anyway; Marco likes to cut his up in red wine before lunch and then have it as dessert. And fish. I wanted to get a rombo, but it cost too much. Everyone likes a good boiled bosega, so that’s what I got, but he still wanted ten thousand lire a kilo. Three fish and it cost me almost forty thousand lire.’ She stopped at the first landing, just outside the door to the Bank of Verona, and looked down at Brunetti. ‘When I was a girl, we gave bosega to the cat, and here I am, paying ten thousand lire a kilo for it.’

She turned and started up the next flight. ‘You’re carrying it by the handles, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, Signora.’

‘Good, because I have a kilo of figs right on the top, and I wouldn’t want them to be crushed.’

‘No, they’re all right, Signora.’

‘I went to Casa del Parmigiana and got some prosciutto to go with the figs. I’ve known Giuliano since he was a boy. He’s got the best prosciutto in Venice, don’t you think?’

‘My wife always goes there, Signora.’

‘Costs l’ira di dio, but it’s worth it, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, Signora.’

They were at the top. She still carried the keys, so she didn’t have to hunt for them again. She opened the single lock on the door and pushed it open, letting Brunetti into a large apartment with four tall windows, closed