‘Flavia, could I have something different to drink?’ Brett asked, holding out the half-full glass. Brunetti noticed Flavia’s initial hesitation, the suspicious glance she cast at him, then back at Brett, and he thought how very similar it was to the look Chiara gave him when she was told to do something that would take her out of the room where he and Paola were talking about something they wanted to keep secret from her. With a fluid motion, she got up from her chair, took Brett’s glass, and walked towards the kitchen. At the door, she paused long enough to call back over her shoulder, ‘I’ll get you some mineral water. I’ll see that it takes me a long time to open the bottle.’ The door slammed and she was gone.
What was that all about? Brunetti wondered.
When Flavia was gone, Brett told him. ‘Matsuko and I were lovers. I never told Flavia, but she knows anyway.’ A hard clang from the kitchen confirmed the truth of this.
‘It began in Xian, about a year after she got to the dig.’ Then, to make things clearer, ‘We worked on the exhibition together, and she wrote a chapter for the catalogue.’
‘Whose idea was it that she collaborate on the show?’ Brunetti asked.
Brett made no attempt to hide her embarrassment. ‘Mine? Hers? I don’t remember. It just happened. We were talking about it one night.’ Under the bruises, she blushed. ‘And, in the morning, it had been decided that she would write the article and come to New York to help set up the show.’
‘But you came to Venice alone?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘We both went back to China after the New York opening. I went back to New York to close things down there and then Matsuko came to London to help me set up for the opening. We both went back to China right after that. Then I went back to pack it up for Venice. I thought she’d join me here for the opening, but she refused. She said she wanted . . .’ Brett’s voice dried up. She cleared her throat and repeated, ‘She said she wanted at least this part of the show to be all mine, so she wouldn’t come.’
‘But she came when it was over? When the pieces were sent back to China?’
‘She came from Xian for three weeks,’ Brett said. Brett stopped speaking and looked down at her clasped hands, muttering, ‘I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this,’ which, to Brunetti, suggested that she did.
‘Things were over between us by then, when she came here. I’d met Flavia at the opening. I told Matsuko when I got back to Xian about a month after the show opened here.’
‘How did she react when you told her?’
‘How would you expect her to react, Guido? She was gay, little more than a kid, caught between two cultures, raised in Japan and educated in America. When I went back to Xian after the Venice opening — I’d been away almost two months - she cried when I showed her the Italian catalogue with her article in it. She’d helped mount the most important show in our field in decades, and she was in love with her boss, and she thought her boss was in love with her. And there I was, breezing in from Venice to tell her everything was over, that I was in love with someone else, and when she asked why, I stupidly said something about culture, about the difficulty of ever really understanding someone from a different culture. I told her that she and I didn’t share it but that Flavia and I had a common culture.’ Another loud crash from the kitchen was enough to show this up as the lie it was.
‘How did she react?’ Brunetti asked.
‘If it had been Flavia, I suppose she would have killed me. But Matsuko was Japanese, no matter how long she had been in America. She bowed very deeply and left my room.’
‘And after that?’
‘After that, she was the perfect assistant. Very formal and distant and very efficient. She was gifted in what she did.’ She paused for a long time and then said, ‘I don’t like what I did to her, Guido,’ in a soft voice.
‘Why did she come here to send things back to China?’
‘I was in New York,’ Brett said, as if that explained things. To Brunetti, it didn’t, but he decided to leave that until later. ‘I called Matsuko and asked her if she would oversee the closing here and send things back to China.’
‘And she agreed?’
‘I told you, she was my assistant. The exhibition meant as much to her as it did to me.’ Hearing how that sounded, Brett added, ‘At least I thought it did.’
‘What about her family?’ he asked.
Obviously surprised by the question, Brett asked, ‘What about them?’
‘Are they rich?’
‘To understand if she did it for money,’ he explained.
‘I don’t like the way you simply assume that she was involved in this,’ Brett protested, but weakly.
‘Is it safe to come back?’ Flavia asked in a loud voice from the kitchen.
‘Stop it, Flavia,’ Brett shot back angrily
Flavia came back, carrying a single glass of mineral water, bubbles swirling up happily from the bottom. She set it down in front of Brett, looked at her watch, and said, ‘It’s time for you to take your pills.’ Silence. ‘Do you want me to get them?’
With no warning, Brett slammed her fist down on the surface of the marble table, causing the tray to rattle and a jolt of bubbles to swirl up from the bottom of all the glasses. ‘I’ll get my own pills, damn it.’ She pushed herself up from the sofa and walked quickly across the room. Seconds later, the sharp crack of another slammed door echoed back into the living room.
Flavia sat back in her chair, picked up her champagne glass, and took a sip. ‘Warm,’ she remarked. The champagne? The temperature of the room? Brett’s temper? She poured the contents of her glass into Brett’s champagne glass and emptied the bottle into her own. She took a tentative sip, then smiled across at Brunetti.
