the four statues contained with them, he might have been believed. As it was, he was under arrest, and his lawyer had the responsibility of producing the invoices and dockets that would implicate Semenzato.
La Capra, in Palermo, where he had taken his son’s body for burial, seemed to have lost all interest in his collection. He had ignored all orders to produce further documents that could prove either purchase or ownership. The police, therefore, had confiscated all pieces known or believed to be stolen and were continuing to search for the source of those few which had still not been identified. Brunetti was pleased to note that Carrara had seen to it that the pieces taken from the Chinese show at the Ducal Palace were not listed in the inventory of objects found in La Capra’s house. Only three people - Brunetti, Flavia and Brett - knew where they were.
The second file contained the mounting papers on the case against La Capra, his late son, and the men arrested with him. Both of the men who had beaten Dottoressa Lynch had been in the
La Capra, for his part, maintained that he had no idea that the two men, whom he identified as his driver and his bodyguard, had attempted to rob the apartment of Dottoressa Lynch, a woman for whom he had the highest professional regard. At the beginning, he also asserted that he neither knew nor had dealings of any sort with Dottor Semenzato. But as information flowed in from those places where he and Semenzato had met, as various dealers and antiquarians signed statements linking the two men together in a host of business dealings, La Capra’s story ebbed away as did the waters of
He had been ordered to return to Venice or risk being carried back by the police, but he had placed himself under doctor’s care and had been committed to a private clinic, suffering from ‘nervous collapse resulting from personal grief. He remained there, physically and, in a country where only the bond between parent and child remained sacred, legally untouchable.
Brunetti pushed the files away from him and stared at the empty surface of his desk, imagining the forces that had already been brought into play in this. La Capra was a man not without influence. And he now had a dead son, a young man of violent temper. Hadn’t the two thugs, the day after they’d spoken to their lawyer, recalled hearing Salvatore once say that Dottor Semenzato had treated his father without respect? Something about a statue that he had bought for his father that turned out to be false - something like that. And, yes, they thought they could remember hearing him say he would make the Dottore sorry he had ever recommended false artifacts for his father or for him to buy for his father.
Brunetti had no doubt that, as time passed, the two thugs would remember more and more, and all of it would point to poor Salvatore, bent on nothing else but the mistaken defence of his father’s honour and his own. And they’d probably recall the many occasions when Signor La Capra had tried to persuade his son that Dottor Semenzato was an honest man, that he had always acted in good faith when he endorsed pieces that were then sold by Murino, his partner. Perhaps the judges, if the case ever got that far, would have to listen to a tale of Salvatore’s desire to give his father nothing but pleasure, devoted son that he was. And Salvatore, not at all a sophisticated boy, but good, good at heart, would have tried to procure these presents for his beloved father in the only way he could think of, by seeking the advice of Dottor Semenzato. And given his devotion to his father, his intense desire to please him, it was but a short step to imagine his rage when he discovered that Dottor Semenzato had attempted to take advantage of both his innocence and his generosity by selling him a copy instead of an original piece. From there, it was but no distance at all to the injustice of adding to a father’s grief, a father who had to bear in one blow the death of his beloved only son and the sad knowledge of the lengths to which that son was capable of going in his attempts both to give his father pleasure and to defend their family honour.
Yes, it would hold, and the association between La Capra and Semenzato would, instead of working as evidence of his guilt, be used as the opposite, as an explanation of the underlying good faith between the two men, a trust destroyed by the dishonesty of Semenzato and the impulsiveness of Salvatore, alas, now beyond the power of the law. Brunetti had no doubt that the final legal decision would be that Salvatore had killed Semenzato. Well, he might have; no one would ever know. Either he or La Capra had done it, or had it done, and both of them had paid in their own way. Were he a man more given to sentimentality, Brunetti would judge La Capra to have paid the greater price, but he was not, so it seemed to him that Salvatore had paid the greater price for Semenzato’s death.
Brunetti pushed himself up, away from the desk and from the files that led to this conclusion. He had seen La Capra with his son, had pulled him from the slimy waters and helped the screaming man float his son’s body to the foot of the three low steps. And there, it had taken him and Vianello and two of the other officers to separate them, to pull La Capra away from his futile attempt to close with his own fingers the bloodless hole in the side of his son’s neck.
Brunetti had never believed that a life could be paid for with another life, so he again dismissed the idea that La Capra had paid for Semenzato’s death. All grief was separate and discrete, relating only to one loss. But he found it difficult to feel any personal rancour for the man he had last seen howling in the arms of a policeman whose only concern was to keep him from seeing his son’s body as it was carried away on a stretcher, face covered by Vianello’s rain-soaked coat.
He pushed these memories away. It was all beyond him now, taken into the hands of another agency of the law, and he could no longer affect the outcome in any way. He’d had enough of death and violence, enough of pilfered beauty and the lust for the perfect. He longed for springtime and its many imperfections.
* * * *
An hour later, he left the Questura and walked towards San Marco. Everywhere, he saw the same things he’d been seeing for days, but today he chose to call them signs of spring. Even the omnipresent pastel tourists lifted his heart. Via XXII Marzo pulled his steps down towards the Accademia Bridge. On the other side of it, he saw the season’s first long line of tourists waiting to enter the museum, but he had seen enough of art for a while. The water drew him now and the thought of sitting in the young sun with Flavia, having a coffee, talking of this and that, seeing the way her face went so quickly from ease to joy and back again. He was to meet her at Il Cucciolo at eleven, and he already delighted in the thought of the sound of the waters stirring under the wooden deck, of the desultory motion of the waiters, not yet thawed from their winter lethargy, and of the large valiant umbrellas which insisted on creating shade, long before there was any need of it. He took even greater delight in the thought of the sound of her voice.
Ahead of him he saw the waters of the Giudecca Canal and, beyond them, the happy fa c ades of the buildings on the other side. From the left, a tanker steamed into view, riding high and empty in the water, and even its streaked grey hull seemed bright and beautiful in this light. A dog scampered past, kicked up its hind legs, then circled back upon itself, bent on capturing its tail.
At the water’s edge, he turned left and walked towards the open deck of the bar, searching for her. Four couples, a lone man, another, a woman and two children, a table with six or seven young girls whose giggles were audible even as he approached. But no Flavia. Perhaps she was late. Perhaps he hadn’t recognized her. He began again at the first near table and studied everyone again, in the same order. And saw her, sitting with the two
