No, they’re safe. They’re too high up. But some day I expect to come in and find the little bastards have moved the ladder in the night and climbed up to eat them all.’ The fact that Lele laughed when he said this made him sound no less serious about it. He dropped the clippers and tape into a drawer and turned to Brunetti. ‘All right, what is this talk that might be police talk?’
‘Semenzato, at the museum, and the Chinese exhibition held there a few years ago,’ Brunetti explained.
Lele grunted in acknowledgement of the request and moved across the room to stand under a wrought-iron candelabrum attached to the wall. He reached up and bent one of the leaf-shaped prongs a bit to the left, stepped back to examine it, then leaned forward to bend it a tiny bit more. Satisfied, he went back to Brunetti.
‘He’s been at the museum for about eight years, Semenzato, and he’s managed to organize a number of international shows. That means he’s got good connections with museums or their directors in foreign countries, knows a lot of people in lots of places.’
‘Anything else?’ Brunetti asked, voice neutral.
‘He’s a good administrator. He’s hired a number of excellent people and brought them to Venice. There are two restorers he all but stole from the Courtauld, and he’s done a lot to change the way the exhibitions are publicized.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed that.’ At times, Brunetti felt that Venice had been turned into a whore forced to choose between different Johns: first the city was offered the face from a Phoenician glass earring, saw the poster reproduced a thousand times, then that was quickly replaced with a portrait by Titian, which in turn was driven out by Andy Warhol, himself then quickly banished by a Celtic silver deer as the museums covered every available surface in the city and vied endlessly for the attention and box office receipts of the passing tourists. What would come next, he wondered, Leonardo T-shirts? No, they already had them in Florence. He’d seen enough posters for art shows to last a lifetime in hell.
‘Do you know him?’ Brunetti asked, wondering if that was the reason for Lele’s uncharacteristic objectivity.
‘Oh, we’ve met a few times.’
‘Where?’
‘The museum has called me in a few times to ask about majolica pieces they were offered, if I thought they were genuine or not.’
‘And you met him then?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you think of him personally?’
‘He seemed a very pleasant, competent man.’
Brunetti had had enough. ‘Come on, Lele, this is unofficial. It’s me, Guido, asking you, not Commissario Brunetti. I want to know what you think of him.’
Lele looked down at the surface of the desk that stood beside him, moved a ceramic bowl a few millimetres to the left, glanced up at Brunetti, and said, ‘I think his eyes are for sale.’
‘What?’ asked Brunetti, not understanding at all.
‘Like Berenson. You know, you become an expert on something, and then people come to you and ask you if a piece is genuine or not. And because you’ve spent years or perhaps even your entire life studying something, learning about a painter or a sculptor, they believe you when you say a piece is genuine. Or that it’s not.’
Brunetti nodded. Italy was full of experts; some of them even knew what they were talking about. ‘Why Berenson?’
‘It seems he sold his eyes. Gallery owners or private collectors would ask him to authenticate certain pieces, and sometimes he’d say that they were genuine, but later they’d turn out not to be.’ Brunetti started to ask a question, but Lele cut him off. ‘No, don’t even ask if it could have been an honest mistake. There’s proof that he was paid, especially by Duveen, that he got a share of the take. Duveen had a lot of rich American clients; you know the type. They can’t be bothered learning about art, probably don’t even like it much, but they want to be known to have it, to own it. So Duveen matched their desire and their money with Berenson’s reputation and expertise, and everyone was happy; the Americans with their paintings, all with clear attributions; Duveen with the profits from the sales; and Berenson with both his reputation and his cut of the take.’
Brunetti paused a moment before he asked, ‘And Semenzato does the same?’
‘I’m not sure. But of the last four pieces they brought me in to take a look at, two were imitations.’ He thought for a moment, then added, grudgingly, ‘Good imitations, but still imitations.’
‘How did you know?’
Lele looked at him as though Brunetti had asked him how he knew a particular flower was a rose and not an iris. ‘I looked at them,’ he said simply.
‘Did you convince them?’
Lele weighed for a moment whether to be offended by the question or not, but then he remembered that Brunetti was, after all, only a policeman. ‘The curators decided not to acquire the pieces.’
‘Who had decided, originally, to buy them?’ But he knew the answer.
‘Semenzato.’
‘And who was offering to sell them?’
‘We were never told. Semenzato said it was a private sale, that he had been contacted by a private dealer who wanted to sell the pieces, two plates that were supposed to be Florentine, fourteenth century, and two Venetian. Those two were genuine.’
‘All from the same source?’
