Eyes still closed, Brunetti asked, 'Why?'
There was a kind of simplicity about her, a complete lack of sophistication. Maybe you could call it artlessness, maybe innocence,' she said, then added, 'whatever that is.'
'That sounds very speculative’ Brunetti observed.
‘I know,' she admitted. 'It's just an impression.'
'Do you still have her papers?'
'The ones she wrote for me?'
'Yes.'
'Of course. They're all in the archive.'
'Would it make any sense to look through them?'
Paola considered this for a long time before answering. 'Probably not. If I read them now, or you did, we'd be looking for things that might not necessarily be there. I think it's enough to trust my general impression that she was a decent, generous girl who tended to believe in human goodness.'
'And who was consequently stabbed to death.' 'Consequently?'
'No, I just said that,' Brunetti admitted. 'I'd hate to think one was the consequence of the other.' Though both of them prided themselves in seeing these same qualities in their daughter, neither of them, perhaps out of modesty, though more likely out of superstitious fear, dared to say it. Instead, Brunetti placed his glass on the floor and drifted off to sleep, while Paola put on her glasses and drifted into the sort of trance state that the reading of student papers is bound to induce in the adult mind.
14
He stopped in Signorina Elettra's office when he got back to the Questura and found her on the phone, speaking French. She held up her hand to signal to him to wait, said something else, laughed, and hung up.
He refused to ask about the call and said, 'Has Bocchese brought up those papers?'
'Yes, sir. And I've got people working on it.'
'What does that mean?'
‘My friend is going to have a look’ she said, nodding in the direction of the phone, *but I doubt he'll have anything for me until after the banks close.'
'Geneva?' he asked.
Manfully, he resisted the temptation either to comment or to inquire further. 'I'll be in my office’ he said and went back upstairs.
He stood at the window, gazing at the two yellow cranes that rose above the church of San Lorenzo. They'd been there for so long that Brunetti had come to think of them almost as a pair of angel wings soaring up from either side of the church. He thought they'd been there when he first came to the Questura, but surely no restoration could possibly take that long. Had he, he wondered, ever seen them move, or were they ever in a position different from the one in which they were today? He devoted a great deal of time to these considerations, all the while letting the problem of Claudia Leonardo percolate in some other part of his mind.
The angel wings, he realized, reminded him of an angel that appeared in a painting that hung on the wall behind Signora Jacobs's chair, a painting of the Flemish school, the angel jaundiced and unhappy as if it had been appointed guardian of a person of limitless rectitude and found the assignment dull.
He dialled Lele's number again. When the painter answered, Brunetti said only, 'Has there ever been talk that the Austrian woman might have those paintings and drawings in her home?'
He thought Lele would ask him why he wanted to know, but the painter answered simply, 'Of course, there's always been talk. No one, so far as I know, has ever been inside, so it's only talk, and you know how those things are. People always talk, even if they don't know anything, and they always exaggerate.' There was a long pause, and Brunetti could almost hear Lele turning this over in his mind. 'And I expect,' he went on, 'that if anyone did get inside and see anything he wouldn't say so.'
'Why not?'
Lele laughed, the same old cynical snort Brunetti had heard for decades. 'Because they'd hope that if they kept quiet no one else would be curious about what she might have.'
‘I still don't understand.'
'She's not going to live for ever, you know, Guido.' 'And?'
'And if she's got things, she might want to sell some of them before she dies.'
'Do people talk about where they might have come from?' Brunetti asked.
'Ahhh.' Lele's long sigh could be read as satisfaction that Brunetti had finally thought to ask the right question or as a sign of his delight in human weakness.
'That can't be far to look, can it?' the painter finally asked by way of response.
'Guzzardi?'
'Of course.'
'From what you've said about her, she doesn't seem the kind of person who would have anything to do with that sort of thing.'
'Guido,' Lele said with unaccustomed severity, 'your years with the police should have taught you that people are far more willing to profit from a crime than to commit it.' Before Brunetti could object, Lele went on, 'Dare I mention the good Cardinal and Prince of the Church currently under investigation for collusion with the Mafia?'
Brunetti had spent decades listening to Lele in this vein, but he suddenly had no patience for it, and so he cut him off. 'See what you can find out, all right?'
Apparently feeling no ill will at having been so summarily interrupted, the painter asked only, Why are you so curious?'
Brunetti himself didn't know or couldn't see the reason clearly. 'Because there's nothing else I can think of,' he admitted.
That's not the sort of remark that would make me have much confidence in public officials,' Lele said.
'Is there anything that could ever make you have confidence in public officials?'
The very idea’ the painter said and was gone.
Brunetti sat and tried to think of a way to get back into
Signora Jacobs's apartment. He pictured her slumped in her chair, drawing the smoke into her lungs with desperate breaths. He summoned the scene up from memory, examining it as though it were part of the puzzle, 'What's Wrong with this Picture?' Ash-covered carpet, windows a long distance in time from their last cleaning, the Iznik tiles, what could only have been a celadon bowl on the table, the blue packet of Nazionali, the cheap lighter, one shoe with a hole worn through in front by her big toe, the drawing of a Degas dancer. What was wrong with this picture?
It was so obvious that he called himself an idiot for not having registered it sooner: the dissonance between wealth and poverty. Any one of those tiles, just one of those drawings, could have paid to have the entire place restructured, not just cleaned; and anyone in possession of one of those prints would certainly not have to content themselves with the cheapest cigarettes on the market. He searched his memory for other signs of poverty, tried to remember what she had been wearing, but no one pays much attention to old women. He had only the vaguest impression of something dark: grey, brown, black, a skirt or dress, at any rate something that had come down almost to her feet. He couldn't even, remember if her clothing had been clean or not, nor if she had worn jewellery. He hoped he would remember his own inability to remember details the next time he grew impatient with a witness to a crime who had difficulty in describing the perpetrator.
The phone startled him from this reverie.
'Yes,' he said.
‘You might like to come down here, sir’ Signorina Elettra said.
'Yes’ he repeated, without bothering to ask if she'd had an answer from her friend in Geneva.
When he reached her office, her smile was proof that she had. 'It came from a gallery in Lausanne called Patmos’ she said as he came in. ‘It was paid into an account in Geneva each month to be transferred here, to her
