Goya's drawings of a firing squad.
As he stood, petrified as Lot's wife, a voice said from somewhere to his left, 'Are you going to come and tell me what it is you have to say, Commissario?'
He turned away from the pictures, eyes skimming over what might have been a tiny Memling, a set of Otto Dix drawings, and an unidentifiable and particularly unerotic nude, and followed the voice into the living room. Again his senses were assaulted: the smell was heavier, thicker, so strong that he could feel it beginning to sink into the cloth of his jacket; and the objects on display had lost even the negligible order imposed upon those along the walls of the corridor. One entire wall was covered with Persian or Indian miniatures in gold frames: there must have been thirty of them. The wall to his left held three tiles that even his eye could distinguish as Iznik as well as a large collection of other Middle Eastern ceramic plates and tiles, but the same wall also held a life-sized wooden crucifix. To his right he saw pen and ink drawings, but before he could begin to examine them closely, his attention was drawn to the old woman as she sank heavily into a velvet-covered armchair.
The chair stood in the centre of a carpet that appeared to be an Esfahani: only fine silk would give the luminous sheen in the small portion at the far end that he could see. All trace of silk, in fact all trace of anything at all, was obscured by a wide arc of ground-in ash that spread in a half-circle beneath and in front of her chair. Automatically, with a gesture that seemed as instinctive and rhythmic as breathing, she took a blue packet of Nazionali from the top of the table beside her and lit one with a cheap plastic lighter.
After she had inhaled deeply, she said, 'Will you tell me now what it is you've come to tell me?'
'It's Claudia Leonardo,' he said. 'She's been killed.'
The hand with the cigarette fell, as if forgotten, beside her. She closed her eyes and, had her spine permitted it, her head would have fallen against the back of the high chair. Instead, the gesture merely raised her head until she was looking directly across at him. When he noticed that the angle seemed difficult for her, he moved a chair opposite her and sat down so that she could lower her head and still see him clearly.
'Oh, God. I thought it couldn't happen,' she said under her breath, perhaps not even conscious that she had spoken out loud. She stared a moment longer at Brunetti, then raised a hand with an effort and covered her eyes.
Brunetti was about to ask her what she meant when he noticed smoke rising from beside her. Immediately, he stood and moved towards her. She seemed not the least interested in the sudden, possibly menacing, action. Brunetti picked up the cigarette and stabbed with his foot at the smouldering patch of silk.
Signora Jacobs seemed entirely unaware that he was there, or of what he was doing. 'Are you all right, Signora?' he said, placing one hand on her shoulder. She gave no sign that she heard him. 'Signora’ he repeated, increasing the pressure of his hand.
The hand she held across her eyes slapped down on to her lap, but her eyes remained closed. He moved away from her a little, willing her to open them. When she did, she said, 'In the kitchen. Pills on the table.'
He ran towards the back of the apartment and down another corridor, this one lined with books. He saw a sink through a door on the left, tossed her cigarette into it and grabbed the single bottle of pills that stood on the table. He paused to fill a glass with water and went back to her. He handed her the bottle and waited while she opened it and tipped out two white pills the size of aspirin. She put them into her mouth and held up a hand to reject the proffered glass of water. She closed her eyes again and sat, utterly quiet. When he saw her relax and some hint of colour begin to seep into her face, he was unable to resist the temptation to look again at the walls.
He was used to manifestations of great wealth, though his perhaps stubborn insistence that the family live on their salaries alone kept the opulence of the Falier family at bay. Nevertheless a few paintings - personal possessions of Paola's, like the Canaletto in the kitchen - had managed to slip into the house, in the manner of homeless cats on rainy nights. He was familiar with his father-in-law's collection, as well as those of some of the Count's friends, to make no mention of what he had observed in the homes of wealthy suspects he had questioned. Nothing he had previously seen, however, could have prepared him for this grandiose promiscuity: paintings, ceramics, carvings, prints jostled one another as if competing for pride of place. Order did not exist, but beauty overwhelmed him.
He glanced at Signora Jacobs and saw that she was looking at him as she groped for her cigarettes. He moved around the chair and sat down again while she lit a cigarette and drew on it deeply, almost defiantly. 'What happened?'
'Her flatmate came home this morning and found her in the apartment. She was dead, probably killed some time yesterday evening.'
'How?'
'Stabbed'
’Who did it?'
'It might have been a thief or a burglar.' Even as he spoke, he realized how unconvincing this sounded.
'Things like that don't happen here,' she said. Without bothering to look to see if there were an ashtray beside her, she flicked the ash from her cigarette on to the carpet at her feet.
'No, they usually don't, Signora. But so far we've found nothing that might suggest another explanation.'
'What have you found?' she demanded, surprising him by the speed with which she had recovered her composure.
'Her address book.'
Intelligence flared in her pale eyes. 'And I just happened to be the first person you came to see?'
'No, Signora. I came to see you because, in a sense, I already knew about you.'
'Knew what about me?' she asked, unsuccessfully attempting to disguise the alarm anyone in Italy would feel at the idea that the police knew something about them.
That Claudia thought of you as her grandmother and that you wanted her to find out about obtaining an official reversal of the conviction of someone who had died on San Servolo.' He saw no reason to hide this from her: sooner or later he would have to question her about this and he might as well begin now, while the shock of what she had just learned might lower her resistance to answering questions of any sort.
She dropped the cigarette on to the carpet and stamped it out, then immediately lit another. Her gestures were slow and careful: she must be, he estimated, well into her eighties. She took three hungry puffs at the cigarette, as though she had not just finished the other. Without asking, Brunetti got up and went to a table behind her and returned with the lid of a jar, which seemed to serve as an ashtray. He set it beside her.
Not bothering to thank him, she said, 'Are you the person she talked to?' 'Yes.'
'I told her to go to a lawyer. I offered to pay for it.'
'She did. He told her it would cost her five million lire.'
She sniffed at the sum, condemning it to eternal insignificance. 'So she came to you?'
'In a way, Signora. First she went to my wife, who is one of her professors at the university, and asked her to ask me. But Claudia was apparently not satisfied with the answer I asked my wife to give her, so she came to the Questura to ask me directly.'
'Yes, she'd do that’ the woman said with a smile that barely touched her lips but warmed her voice. 'What did you tell her when you spoke to her?'
'Essentially what I'd told my wife: that I couldn't give an answer until I had a clearer idea of the crime involved.'
'Did she tell you who it was for?' the woman asked, this time failing to keep the suspicion from her voice.
'No,' Brunetti said. It was a lie, but taking unfair advantage of a sick old woman in shock at the death of someone she loved was just part of the job, after all.
The woman turned her eyes away from him and looked at the wall to her right, the one covered with ceramics. It seemed to Brunetti that she did not see them and was unaware of any of the objects in the room. When she hadn't spoken for a long time, he was no longer sure that she was aware of his presence.
Finally she turned back to him. 'I think that's all,' she said.
'I beg your pardon?' Brunetti asked politely, genuinely not understanding what she meant.
'That's all. That’s all I want to know, and that's all I want to say to you.'
‘I wish it were that simple, Signora’ he said with real sympathy. 'But I'm afraid you have little choice. This is a murder investigation, and you have the duty to answer questions put to you by the police.'
