‘Did either of you recognize any of the photos?’ he asked, though he was sure the officer who had brought over the photos of men who matched the descriptions the two women had given would have told him if they had.
Flavia shook her head, and Brett said, ‘No.’
‘You said they warned you not to go to a meeting with Dottor Semenzato. Then you said something about ceramics from the China exhibition. Do you mean the one that was here, at the Doge’s Palace?’
‘Yes.’
‘I remember,’ Brunetti said. ‘You organized it, didn’t you?’ he asked.
She forgot and nodded, then rested her head back on the pillows and waited a moment for the world to stop spinning. When it did, she said, ‘Some pieces came from our dig, in Xian. The Chinese chose me as liaison. I know people.’ Even though the wires were gone, she still moved her jaw gingerly; a deep buzz still underlay everything she said and filled her ears with its constant whine.
Flavia interrupted and explained for her. ‘The show opened first in New York and then went to London. Brett went to the New York opening and then back to close it down for shipment to London. But she had to go back to China before the London opening. Something happened at the dig.’ Turning to Brett, she asked, ‘What was it,
‘Treasure.’
That, apparently, was enough to remind Flavia. ‘They’d just opened up the passage into the burial chamber, so they called Brett in London and told her she had to go back to oversee the excavation of the tomb.’
‘Who was in charge of the opening here?’
This time, Brett answered. ‘I was, I got back from China three days before it closed in London. And then I came here with it to set it up.’ She closed her eyes then, and Brunetti thought she was tired with the talking, but she opened them immediately and continued. ‘I left before the exhibition closed, so they sent the pieces back to China.’
‘They?’ Brunetti asked.
Brett glanced across at Flavia before she answered, then said, ‘Dottor Semenzato was here, and my assistant came from China to close the show and send everything back.’
‘You weren’t in charge?’ he asked.
Again, she looked at Flavia before answering. ‘No, I couldn’t be here. I didn’t see the pieces again until this winter.’
‘Four years later?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes,’ she said and waved her hand as if that would help explain. ‘The shipment got held up on the way back to China and then in Beijing. Red tape. It ended up in a customs warehouse in Shanghai for two years. The pieces from Xian didn’t get back until two months ago.’ Brunetti watched her consider her words, searching for a way to explain. ‘They weren’t the same. Copies. Not the soldier or the jade shroud: they were the originals. But the ceramics, I knew it, but I couldn’t prove it until I tested them, and I couldn’t do that in China.’
He had learned enough from Lele’s offended glance not to ask her how she knew they were false. She just knew, and that was that. Prevented from asking a qualitative question, he could still ask a quantitative one. ‘How many pieces were fake?’
‘Three. Maybe four or five. And that’s only from the dig in Xian where I am.’
‘What about other pieces from the show?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. That’s not the sort of question you can ask in China.’
Through all of this, Flavia sat quietly, turning her head back and forth as they spoke. Her lack of surprise told him that she already knew about this.
‘What have you done?’ Brunetti asked.
‘So far, nothing.’
Given the fact that this conversation was taking place in a hospital room and she was speaking through swollen lips, this seemed, to Brunetti, something of an understatement. ‘Who did you tell about it?’
‘Only Semenzato. I wrote to him from China, three months ago, and told him some of the pieces sent back were copies. I asked to see him.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘Nothing. He didn’t answer my letter. I waited three weeks, then I tried to call him, but that’s not easy, from China. So I came here to talk to him.’
Just like that? You can’t get through-on the phone, so you jump on a plane and fly halfway around the world to talk to someone?
As if she had read his thoughts, she answered. ‘It’s my reputation. I’m responsible for those pieces.’
Flavia broke in here. ‘The pieces could have been switched when they got back to China. It didn’t have to happen here. And you’re hardly responsible for what happened when they got there.’ There was real animosity in Flavia’s voice. Brunetti found it interesting that she sounded jealous, of all things, of a country.
Her tone wasn’t lost on Brett, who answered sharply, ‘It doesn’t matter where it happened; it happened.’
To divert them both and remembering what Lele had said about ‘knowing’ that something was genuine or false, Brunetti the policeman asked, ‘Do you have proof?’
‘Yes,’ Brett began, voice more slurred than it had been when he arrived.
Hearing that, Flavia interrupted them both and turned to Brunetti. ‘I think that’s enough, Dottor
