'The father bought paintings; Luca was interested in drawings and etchings.'
'Is that what Luca was good at?'
'Not particularly, no, I don't think so. But they're very portable, and because there's always more than one etching and because very often painters made a few sketches or drawings before a painting, it's harder to trace them than if they were unique. And they're very easy to hide.'
1 had no idea any of this went on,' Brunetti said when it seemed that Lele had finished speaking.
'Few people do. And even fewer want to know anything about it. That's what we did, right after Liberation: we all decided that we'd forget what had happened during the last decade, especially in the years since the beginning of the war. Besides, we finished on the winning side, so it was even easier to forget. That’s what we've had since then, the politics of amnesia. If s what we wanted and it's what we've got.'
Brunetti had seldom heard it better named. 'Anything else?' he asked.
‘I could fill a history book with what went on during those years. Then, as soon as the war ended, things went back to business as usual, just like in Germany. Well, no, it took a little longer there because they had to go through all that de-Nazification stuff, not that it served for much. But these pigs, these agents, had their snouts back in the trough almost as soon as the war was over’
‘You make it sound like you know them.'
'Of course I do. A few of them are still alive. One of them even has a portfolio of Old Master drawings in a bank vault, has had it there since he acquired it in 1944.'
'Legally?'
Lele gave a snort of contempt. 'If someone is in fear of his life and sells something, signs a bill of sale - and the Guzzardis were always careful to get them - then the sale's still legal. But if someone were to steal those drawings from the bank vault and give them back to the original owner, I'm sure that would be illegal.' Lele allowed a long pause to draw out from that remark before he said abruptly, ‘I’ll call you if I think of anything,' and then his voice was gone.
9
Brunetti had the entire afternoon to muse upon what Lele had told him. He'd read little of the history of the last war, but certainly other centuries provided sufficient examples of plundering and profiteering to illustrate all that Lele had said. The sack of Rome, the sack of Constantinople: hadn't both of them been followed by vast transfers of wealth and art and by the collateral destruction of even more? Rome had been left in ruins, and Byzantium smouldered for weeks as the victors devoted themselves to looting. Indeed, the bronze horses that pranced above the entrance of the Basilica had been part of the loot the Venetians brought home. Certainly the defeat of those cities must have been preceded by hysteria on the part of those desperate to escape. In the end, no matter how beautiful or precious, what object had any value in comparison to life? Some years ago he had read an account by a French crusader who had been present at the siege and sack of Constantinople: he'd written that 'so much booty had never been gained in any city since the creation of the world'. But what did that count in the face of the loss of so many lives?
Shortly after seven he pulled himself free from these reflections, moved some paper idly from one side of his desk to the other so as to give the appearance that he had done something that afternoon other than try to make sense of human history, and went home.
He found Paola, predictably, in her study, where he joined her, flopping down on the battered sofa she refused to part with. 'You never told me about your father,' he said by way of introduction.
'Never told you what about my father?' she asked. Judging by both his tone and his manner that this would be a long conversation, she abandoned the notes she was preparing.
'About the war. And what he did.'
‘You make it sound as if you'd discovered he's a war criminal’ she observed.
'Hardly’ Brunetti conceded. 'But someone told me today that he fought with the Partisans up near Asiago.'
She smiled. 'So now you know as much as I know.'
'Really?'
'Absolutely. I know that he fought and that he was very young when he was there, but he has never chosen to talk to me about it, and I've never had the courage to ask my mother about it.'
'Courage?'
'From her tone and the way she reacted whenever I brought the subject up, as I did when I was younger, I realized that it was not something she wanted to talk about and that I shouldn't ask him, either. So I didn't, and then I suppose I got out of the habit of being curious about it or wanting to know exactly what he did.' Before Brunetti could respond to this, she added, ‘Just like you with your father. All you've ever told me is that he came back from Africa, went off on the Russian campaign and was gone for years, and when he came back everyone who knew him said he wasn't the same person who had marched away. But you've never told me more than that. And your mother, when she talked about it, never said anything more than that he had been gone for five years’
Brunetti's childhood had been scarred by the results of those five years, for his father had been a man much given to fits of violence that came upon him for no apparent reason. A chance word, a gesture, a book lying on the kitchen table: any of these could set him off into a rage from which only Brunetti's mother could free him. As if possessed of the power of the saints themselves, she could do this merely by placing a hand upon his arm: even the lightest touch sufficed to pull him back from whatever hell he had slipped into.
When not in the grip of these sudden, spectacular moods, he was a quiet man, much given to silence and solitude. Repeatedly wounded in the war, he had been granted a military pension, on which the family tried to live. Brunetti had never understood him and, in a certain sense, had never know him, for his wife always insisted that the real man was the one who marched off to war and not the one who came home. She, by the grace of God or love, or both, loved both of them.
Only once had Brunetti seen evidence of the man his father must have been, the day he came home to announce that he was the only student in his class to have been accepted into the Liceo Classico. When he told his parents, doing his best to hide his bursting pride and fearful how his father would take this news, the older man pushed himself up from the table, where he was helping his wife shell peas, and came to stand beside his son. Placing his hand on Brunetti's cheek, he said, ‘You make me a man again, Guido. Thank you.' The memory of his father's smile was enough to call down the stars, and for the first time since his childhood Brunetti had felt himself melt with love for this gentle, decent man.
'Are you listening to me, Guido?' Paola asked, calling him back to her room and her presence.
'Yes, yes. I was just thinking about something.'
'So,' she went on as though there had been no interruption, 'I know as little about what my father did as you know about yours. They fought and they came back, and neither of them wanted to talk about what happened while they were away.'
'Do you think it was so awful, what they had to do?'
'Or what was done to them,' Paola answered.
There was a difference, though,' he said.
‘What?'
‘Your father came back to fight voluntarily. Or he must have. Lele said,the family got safely to England, so he must have chosen to come back.'
'And your father?'
'My mother always told me he never wanted to join the Army. But he had no choice. They rounded them up, and after they'd trained them to march together without falling over one another, they sent them off to campaign in Africa and Greece and Albania and Russia, sent them off with shoes made out of cardboard because some friend of some friend of someone in the government made a fortune on the contract.'
'He really never talked about it?' Paola asked.
'Not to me, and not to Sergio, no,' Brunetti said.
'Do you think he might have talked to his friends?'
'I don't think he had any friends,' Brunetti said, admitting to what he had always thought of as the great
