Wilful behaviour

Salima considered his question for a long time, as if holding it up to the light at a different angle and seeing it in a different manner. 'No. She said only that she was in danger. She didn't say from what.'

'But you assumed it meant her heart?'

'Yes.'

'Could it have been something else?'

Her answer was long delayed. 'Yes.'

'Did she say anything else to you?'

She pulled her lips together, and then he saw her tongue shoot out and moisten them. Her hands were folded primly on the edge of the table, and she looked down at them. She bowed her head and said something so softly that Brunetti couldn't hear.

'I'm sorry, Signora. I didn't hear.'

'She gave me something.'

'What was that, Signora?'

'I think it was papers.'

‘You only think?'

'It was an envelope. She gave me an envelope and told me to keep it.' 'Until when?'

'She didn't say. She just told me to hold on to it.' 'When did she give it to you?'

He watched her count out the time. Two days after the girl died.'

'Did she say anything?' 'No, but I think she was afraid.' 'What makes you say that, Signora?' She raised those perfect eyes to his and said, 'Because I am familiar with fear.'

Brunetti glanced away. ‘Do you still have it?' 'Yes.'

'Would you get it for me, Signora?'

'You're police, aren't you?' she asked, head still bowed, her full beauty hidden from him, as if fearful of what it could provoke in a man with power over her.

‘Yes. But you've done nothing wrong, Signora, and nothing will happen to you.'

Her sigh was as deep as the gulf between their cultures. 'What must I do for you?' she asked, her voice tired now, resigned.

'Nothing, Signora. Only give me the papers and then I'll go. No more police will come to bother you.'

She still hesitated, and he thought she must be trying to think of something she could have him swear by, something that would be sacred to both of them. Whatever it was she sought in that silence, she failed to find it. Without looking at him, she got silently to her feet and went to the chest of drawers.

She pulled open the top drawer and from right on top pulled out a large manilla envelope that bulged with whatever was inside. Careful to hold it in both hands, she passed it to him.

Brunetti thanked her and took it. With no hesitation, he unhooked the two metal wings that held it closed. It was not taped or glued, and he would not insult her by asking if she had ever opened it.

He slipped his right hand inside and felt the soft crinkle of tissue paper extending from the top of what further exploration revealed were twin pieces of cardboard. At the bottom he felt another envelope, this one thick. He took his hand out and, using only the tips of his fingers, extracted whatever was held inside the sheets of cardboard. He slipped the tissue-clad paper from inside the cardboard and laid it on the table: it was a rectangle little larger than a book, perhaps the size of a small magazine. A small piece of paper was taped to the outside of the tissue paper, and on it a slanting hand, trained to write a script more angular than Italian, was written, This is for Salima Maffeki, a free gift of something that has long been in my personal possession’ It was signed 'Hedwig Jacobs' and bore a date three days before her death.

Brunetti peeled back the tissue paper and opened it, as he would the doors of an Advent calendar. 'Oddio,' he said, exclaiming as he. identified the sketched figure which lay in his mother's arms. It could only be a Tiziano, but he did not have the expert's eye to be able to say more than that.

She had turned towards him, not in curiosity at the drawing but at his exclamation, and he looked up to see her turn away from that than which nothing could be more harram, an image of their false god, this god so false that he could die. She turned as from obscenity.

Brunetti folded the tissue paper carefully closed and slipped the drawing back inside the joined sheets of cardboard, saying nothing. He set it aside and pulled out the second envelope. It, too, was unsealed. He lifted the flap and took out a batch of what might have been letters, all neatly folded into three horizontal sections held together by an elastic.

He opened the first: ‘I, Alberto Foa, sell the following paintings to Luca Guzzardi for the sum of four hundred thousand lire’ The paper was dated 11 January 1943 and contained a listing of nine paintings, all by famous artists. He opened two others and discovered that they, too, were bills of sale to Luca Guzzardi, both bearing dates before Mussolini's fall. One of them referred to drawings; the other listed paintings and statues.

Brunetti counted the remaining sheets of paper. Twenty-nine. With the three he had opened, a total of thirty-two bills of sale, no doubt all signed and dated and perfectly legitimate and, more importantly, legally binding proof that the objects in Signora Jacobs's possession had been the legitimate possessions of Luca Guzzardi, her lover, mad and dead this half-century.

More interestingly, that they were the inheritance of Claudia Leonardo, Guzzardi's granddaughter, stabbed to death and dead intestate.

He folded the three bills of sale and put them back on the pile, then caught them up in the elastic and slipped them back into their envelope.

He put that and, very carefully, the Tiziano sketch back into the larger envelope. 'Signora,' he said, looking across at her. ‘I have to take this with me’

She nodded.

'Signora, you must believe me when I tell you that you are in no danger. If you like, I will bring my wife and my daughter here and you can ask them if I am an honest man. I think they'll tell you that I am, but I'll do that if you want me to.'

'I believe you,' she said, still not looking at him.

'Then believe this, Signora, because it's important. Signora Jacobs has given you a great deal of money. I don't know how much it is, and I won't know until I speak to a man who can tell me. But it is a great deal.'

'Is it five million lire?' she asked with such longing that she must have believed that with that sum she could buy joy or peace or a place in paradise.

'Why do you need that amount, Signora?'

'My husband. And my daughter. If I can send them that much, then they can get out and come here. That’s why I'm here, to work and save and bring them.'

'It will be more than that,' he said, though he had no idea of the value of the drawing; at least that, probably inestimably more.

He turned his attention to the envelope and started to bend the metal flanges together to seal it again, so he didn't see her move. Her hands came up quickly and took one of his. Turning his hand palm down, she bowed over it and touched it with her forehead, pressing it there for long seconds. He felt her hands tremble.

She released his hand and got to her feet.

Brunetti stood and went to the door, the envelope dangling from one hand. At the door, he extended his hand to shake hers, but she shook her head and kept her hands at her sides, a modest woman who would not shake the hand of a strange man.

23

Brunetti walked away with knees he was surprised to find unsteady. He didn't know if it was the effect of the woman's strange gesture, one that had, he realized, created in him the obligation to see that she received the money that would bring her family to her, or whether his response was to the importance of

the receipts she had given him.

From a bar he called Lele Bortoluzzi and arranged to meet him at his gallery in twenty minutes, which is what he estimated it would take him to get there if he took the 82 from Rialto. When he arrived, the artist was talking to