Drawing Conclusions

‘Gabriela Pavon, though I very much doubt it’s her real name. And the man from whom she was supposedly hiding is Nico Martucci, a Sicilian. That probably is his real name. Lives in Treviso.’ When she began to write down the names, Brunetti said, ‘Don’t bother. I’ve got a friend in Treviso who can tell me. It’ll save time.’

He turned to leave but she said, pointing to some papers on her desk, ‘I’ve found out a few things about Signora Sartori and the man she lived with.’

‘So they aren’t married?’ he asked.

‘Not in the records of the nursing home. Her entire pension goes directly to them, and her companion Morandi pays the rest.’ Then, seeing his surprise, she added, ‘He wouldn’t have to pay, since they’re not married. But he does.’ Brunetti thought of the red-faced man he had met in Signora Sartori’s room.

‘What does it cost?’ Brunetti asked, thinking of what he and his brother had had to pay for their mother for all those years.

‘Two thousand, four hundred a month,’ then, when he raised his eyebrows, she said, ‘It’s one of the best in the city.’ She raised a hand and let it fall. ‘And those are the prices.’

‘How much is her pension?’ he asked.

‘Six hundred euros. She left four years early, so she isn’t eligible for the whole pension.’

Before he tried the maths, Brunetti asked, ‘And his?’

‘Five hundred and twenty.’ Together, their pensions covered barely half of the cost.

The man had not seemed wealthy; nor, Brunetti had to admit, had she. If he was what he seemed, a pensioner in need of paying utilities, rent, and food, where did he find the money for the nursing home?

She picked up the papers and handed them to him; he was surprised to find more than a few sheets. What could two old people like that have done in their lives?

‘What’s in here?’ he asked, holding it up with deliberate exaggeration.

With her most sibylline look, Signorina Elettra observed, ‘Their lives have not been without event.’

Brunetti allowed himself to relax into a smile for what seemed the first time that day. He waved the papers, saying, ‘I’ll have a look.’ She nodded and turned her attention to her computer.

In his office, he first dialled his home number.

Paola answered with a ‘Si’ so devoid of patience as to discourage even the most hardened telephone salesman or to frighten her children into hurrying home to clean their rooms.

‘“And the voice of the turtle dove is heard in our land,”’ he could not stop himself from saying.

‘Guido Brunetti,’ she said, voice no more friendly than it had been with that impersonal ‘Si’, ‘don’t you start quoting the Bible at me.’

‘I read the Song of Songs as literature, not as a sacred text.’

‘And you use it as a provocation,’ she said.

‘Merely following in the tradition of two thousand years of Christian apologists.’

‘You are a wicked, annoying man,’ she said in a lighter voice, and he knew the danger was past.

‘I am a wicked, annoying man who would like to take you to dinner.’

‘And lose out on turbanti di soglie, eaten in peace at your own table, in the midst of the joyous harmony of your family?’ she asked, leaving him uncertain whether the thought of his presence or of the meal had changed her mood.

‘I’ll try to be on time.’

‘Good,’ she said, and he thought she was about to hang up, but she added, ‘I’m glad you’ll be here.’ Then she was gone, and Brunetti was left feeling as though the temperature of the room had just risen or the light had somehow increased. More than twenty years, and she could still do this to him, he thought; he shook his head, hunted for the number of his friend in Treviso, and called.

As he had suspected, the woman’s name was not Gabriela Pavon: the Treviso police could give him six aliases used by the woman whose fingerprints were all over the apartment she had shared with her companion, but they could not supply him with her real name. The Sicilian – Brunetti told himself he had to stop calling him that and, more importantly, thinking of him as that – taught chemistry in a technical school, had no criminal record, and was, at least according to the police there, the victim of a crime. There was no trace of the woman, and his friend was resigned enough to suspect that there would be none until she committed the same crime again in some other part of the country.

Brunetti told him what the woman was probably planning to do in Venice and was asked by his weary friend to send a report, ‘not that it’s going to make any difference. She didn’t commit a crime.’

When he hung up, Brunetti turned his attention to the papers Signorina Elettra had given him. Signora Maria Sartori had been born in Venice eighty years ago; Benito Morandi, eighty-three. The man’s first name struck Brunetti: well he understood what sort of family would name their son Benito in those years. But the sight of the two names joined together prodded Brunetti’s memory, as if Ginger had suddenly rediscovered her Fred. Or Bonnie her Clyde. He looked away from the papers, focusing his memory and not his eyes, and followed the meandering stream of recollection. Something about an old person, but not one of them; some other old person, and when they were not old. It was a memory from his life before work, before Paola and all that came from knowing her. His mother would remember, he caught himself thinking, his mother as she had once been.

He dialled Vianello’s telefonino number. When the Inspector answered, Brunetti asked, ‘You downstairs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come up for a minute, would you?’

‘I’m on my way.’

Staring helped. Brunetti went to the window, looked across the canal, letting the names rumble around in his mind, hoping that putting them together and then separating them would nudge his memory.

Vianello found him like that, hands clasped behind his back, deep in contemplation of either the facade of the church or the three-storey house for vagrant cats that had been built in front of the facade.

Rather than speak, Vianello sat in one of the chairs in front of his superior’s desk. And waited.

Without turning, Brunetti said, ‘Maria Sartori and Benito Morandi.’

There was silence from Vianello, the sound of his heels sliding across the floor as he stretched his legs. More time passed, and then came the long sigh of dawning memory. ‘Madame Reynard,’ he said and permitted himself a smile at having got there first.

Any Venetian, at least one their age, would have remembered sooner or later. Now that Vianello had given him the name, Brunetti also had the memory. Madame Marie Reynard, already a legendary beauty, had come to Venice with her husband almost – could it be? – a century before. They had had five years or so before he died a spectacular death. Brunetti couldn’t recall the means: car, boat, aeroplane. The totality of her grief had cost her their unborn child, and upon her recovery she had lapsed into widowhood and seclusion in their palazzo on the Canal Grande.

He no longer knew when he had first heard the story, but even before Brunetti reached middle school, Madame Reynard had become legend, as is the destiny of mourning spouses, at least if they are both beautiful and rich. The mysterious French woman never left her palazzo, or she left it at night to walk the streets in silent tears, or she allowed only priests to enter, with whom, draped in her widow’s veil, she recited endless rosaries for the repose of her husband’s soul. Or she was a recluse, crucified by grief. Two elements remained constant in all variants: she was beautiful and she was rich.

And then, more than twenty years ago, aged one hundred, widowed for three-quarters of a century, she died. And her lawyer – who had nowhere appeared in any of the legends – turned out to have inherited the palazzo and all it contained, as well as the lands, the investments, and the patent to a process that did something to the strength of cotton fibres, making them resistant to higher temperatures. Whatever it did – and the cloth changed from cotton to silk to wool, depending on the version told – the patent ended up being immeasurably more valuable than the palazzo or the rest.

‘Of course, of course,’ Brunetti said as the tiny figures in his memory moved together and Maria found her Benito: for those were the names of the witnesses to Madame Reynard’s will – Sartori and Morandi – and as such the subject of gossip and speculation that had occupied the city for months. They had worked in the hospital, had no previous knowledge of the dying woman, were certainly not named as beneficiaries of the will, and so were judged to be extraneous to the matter. Brunetti went back to his desk.

‘Weren’t there some French relatives?’ Vianello asked.