Acqua Alta

‘Hey, you down there,’ a man called from the door at the top of the stairs. ‘We’re coming down. We don’t want any trouble.’ When he turned, Brunetti saw the three men standing with their arms raised over their heads.

Vianello came in then, with four men wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying machine guns. The three men on the stairs saw them, too, and stopped to call out again. ‘We don’t want any trouble.’ The four armed men fanned out inside the courtyard, pulled by instinct and training to take cover behind the marble columns.

Brunetti started towards the door to the storeroom but froze when he saw two of the machine guns turned towards him. ‘Vianello,’ he called out, now with something to be angry at, ‘tell them who I am.’ He realized that he must be no more than a rain-sodden man with a pistol in his hand.

‘It’s Commissario Brunetti,’ Vianello called across the courtyard to them; the machine guns turned away from him and redirected themselves at the men frozen on the stairs.

Brunetti continued towards die door, from which the wailing still issued unabated. He moved the bolt and pulled the door back. It stuck, and he had to force its swollen bottom across the stone pavement towards him. Outlined by the bright lights flooding the courtyard, he presented a perfect target to anyone safe inside the darkened storeroom, but he didn’t think of this; the wailing made that impossible.

It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the darkness inside, but when they did, he saw La Capra kneeling to his waist in the water, bent down in a masculine piet a that was a grotesque copy of the one Brunetti had just seen in the courtyard. But this image held a finality the other lacked, for here a parent keened over a dead and only son whose body he had pulled to himself from the filthy water.

* * * *

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Brunetti opened the door to his office and, finding it no more than warm and the heating system silent, breathed a silent prayer of thanksgiving to Saint Leandro, even though weeks had passed since he had worked his yearly miracle. There were other signs of spring: at home that morning, he had noticed that the pansies on the balcony were battering their way through the winter-hardened earth in the vases, and Paola had said she had to replant them this weekend; the wooden table, legs injected with poison, baked in the sun beside them; that morning, he’d seen the first of the black-headed seagulls that spent a brief spring holiday on the waters of the canals each year before heading off elsewhere; and the air breathed with a sudden softness that flowed like a benediction across the islands and the waters.

He hung his coat in the cupboard and walked over to his desk, but he veered away from it and went to stand at the window. There was motion on the scaffolding that covered San Lorenzo this morning; men moved up and down on the ladders and scrambled across the roof. Unlike the bursting insistence of nature, all of this man-made activity, Brunetti was sure, was no more than a false spring and would quickly end, no doubt with the renewal of the contracts.

He stood at the window for some time, until he was distracted by Signorina Elettra’s cheerful ‘Buon giorno.’ Today she was in yellow, a soft silk dress that fell to her knees, and heels so sharp he was glad his floor was stone and not parquet. Like the flowers and the gulls and the soft breezes, she brought grace into the room with her, and he smiled with something that felt like joy.

‘Buon giorno, signorina,’ he said. ‘You look especially lovely today. Like spring itself.’

‘Ah, this rag,’ she said dismissively and flipped fingers down towards the skirt of the dress that must have cost her more than a week’s salary. Her   smile was at odds with her words, so he didn’t  insist.

She handed him two files with a letter clipped to the top of them. ‘This needs your signature, Dottore.’

‘La Capra?’ he asked.

‘Yes. It’s your statement about why you and Officer Vianello went into the palazzo that night.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he muttered while he read quickly through the two-page document, written in response to the complaint of La Capra’s lawyers that Brunetti’s entrance into his home two months before had been illegal. Addressed to the Praetore, it explained that, during the course of his investigation, he had become increasingly convinced that La Capra had played some role in Semenzato’s murder and cited as evidence the fact that Salvatore La Capra’s fingerprints had been found in Semenzato’s office. Acting upon that and spurred by Dottoressa Lynch’s disappearance, he had gone to the La Capra palazzo with Sergeant Vianello and Signora Petrelli. Upon arriving, they had found the door to the courtyard open (as mentioned in the statements given by both Sergeant Vianello and Signora Petrelli) and had entered when they heard what sounded like the screams of a woman. His report carried a full description of events pursuant to their arrival (again, confirmed by the statements of Sergeant Vianello and Signora Petrelli); he offered this explanation to the Praetore to set his mind at rest that their entrance into the property of Signor La Capra had been well within the limits of the law, as it is, beyond question, the right, indeed, the duty, of even a private citizen to answer a call for help, especially if easy and legal access is available to do so. There followed a respectful closing. He took the pen Signorina Elettra held out to him and signed the letter.

‘Thank you, signorina. Is there anything else?’

‘Yes, Dottore. Signora Petrelli called and confirmed your meeting with her.’

More proof of spring. More grace.

‘Thank you, signorina,’ he said, taking the files and returning the letter to her. She smiled and was gone.

* * * *

The first file was from Carrara’s office in Rome and contained a complete list of the articles in La Capra’s collection that the art fraud police had been able to identify. The list of provenance read like a tourist’s, or policeman’s, guide to the plundered troves of the ancient world: Herculaneum, Volterra, Paestum, Corinth. The Orient and Middle East were well represented: Xian, Angkor Wat, the Kuwait Museum. Some of the pieces appeared to have been acquired legitimately, but they were in the minority. More than a few pieces had been declared to be fakes. Good ones, but still fakes. Documents sequestered in La Capra’s home proved that many of the illegal pieces had been acquired from Murino, whose shop was closed to allow the art police to make a complete inventory of the pieces there and in the warehouse he kept in Mestre. He denied all knowledge of illegally acquired pieces and insisted that they must have been brought in by his former partner, Dottor Semenzato. Had it not been for the fact that he had been arrested while accepting delivery of four boxes of alabaster ashtrays made in Hong Kong and of