objects were ceramic or metal. I’ve never been interested in the metal pieces, well, not very much, but I do know it’s almost impossible to cheek them scientifically. For them, you need the eye.’
‘But not for ceramic?’
‘Of course you need the expert eye, but, luckily, the techniques for checking authenticity are as sophisticated as they are for painting.’ She paused a moment and asked again, ‘Do you want me to be technical?’
‘Yes, I do,’ he said, finding his pen and, in the doing, feeling very much like a student.
‘The chief technique we use — and the most reliable - is called thermoluminescence. All we have to do is extract about thirty miligrams of ceramic from any piece we want to test.’ She anticipated his question by explaining, ‘It’s easy. We take it from the back of a plate or from the underside of a vase or a statue. The amount we need is barely noticeable, just enough to get a sample. Then a photo multiplier will tell us, with an accuracy of about ten to fifteen per cent, the age of the material.’
‘How does it work?’ Brunetti asked. ‘I mean, on what principle?’
‘When clay is fired, well, if it’s fired above about 300 degrees centigrade, then all the electrons in the material it’s made out of will be - I suppose there’s no better word for it — they’ll be erased. The heat destroys their electric charges. Then, from that point on, they begin to pick up new electrical charges. That’s what the photo multiplier measures, how much energy they’ve absorbed. The older the material is, the brighter it glows.’
‘And this is accurate?’
‘As I said, to about fifteen per cent. That means, with a piece that’s supposed to be two thousand years old, we can get a reading that will tell us, to within about three hundred years, when it was made - well, when it was last fired.’
‘And did you do this test on the pieces while you were in China?’
She shook her head. ‘No, there’s no equipment like that in Xian.’
‘So how can you be sure?’
She smiled when she answered him. ‘The eye. I looked at them, and I was fairly sure they were fake.’
‘But to be sure? Did you ask anyone else?’
‘I told you. I wrote to Semenzato. And when I didn’t get an answer, I came back here.’ She saved him the question. ‘Yes, I brought samples with me, samples from the three pieces I was most suspicious of and from the other two that I think might be false.’
‘Did Semenzato know you had these samples?’
‘No. I never mentioned it to him.’
‘Where are they?’
‘I stopped in California on the way here and left one set with a friend of mine who’s a curator at the Getty. They have the equipment, so I asked him to run them through for me.’
‘And did he?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘I called him when I got home from the hospital. All three of the pieces that I thought were fake were made within the last few years.’
‘And the other two?’
‘One of them is genuine. The other is a fake.’
‘Is one test enough?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes.’
Even if it weren’t sufficient proof, Brunetti realized, what had happened to her and Semenzato was.
After a moment, Brett asked, ‘Now what?’
‘We try to find out who killed Semenzato and who the two men who came here were.’
Her look was level and very sceptical. Finally, she asked, ‘And what are the chances of that?’
He pulled from his inner pocket the police photos of Salvatore La Capra and passed them over to Brett. ‘Was this one of them?’
She took the photos and studied them for a minute. ‘No,’ she said simply and handed them back to Brunetti.
‘They’re Sicilian,’ she said. ‘They’re probably back home now, paid off and happy with the wife and kids. Their trip was a success; they did both things they were sent to do, scare me and kill Semenzato.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense, does it?’ he asked.
‘What doesn’t make any sense?’
‘I’ve been talking to people who knew him and knew about him, and it seems that Semenzato was mixed up in a number of things that a museum director shouldn’t have had anything to do with.’
‘Like what?’
‘He was a silent partner in an antique business. Other people have told me his professional opinion was for sale.’ Brett apparently needed no explanation of what the second meant.
‘Why is that important?’
